Molecular Ecology of Marine Larvae Dispersal
There are major gaps in our understanding of the
population
and evolutionary biology of marine organisms because we lack adequate
methods to track
dispersal stages. A major focus of our laboratory
is the use of molecular markers to investigate planktonic dispersal of marine
fish and invertebrates. Our goal is to investigate not
only the population genetic consequences of planktonic dispersal but also its role in
recruitment, local adaptation, speciation and range dynamics. A major barrier to progress
has been the technical challenge of
characterizing the complex temporal and spatial
distributions of individual species in plankton communities. However we have
developed new method to assay the abundance of multiple taxa in plankton
samples, using characteristic DNA sequences as molecular tags. With this
method, we can detect the presence of a single organism in a large plankton sample (Bilodeau, et al.,
1999;
MaKinster, et al., 1999) as well as
estimate the total biomass of a species. In collaboration with Steven Morgan and John
Largier at Bodega
Marine Laboratory (UC Davis) and Steve Gaines at UC Santa Barbara, this approach is being used in ongoing
investigations of the coupling between near-shore oceanographic processes and benthic
recruitment on the west coast of North America.
