The Cnidarian Tree of Life Project

Ph.D Candidate, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Kansas

Systematics and Biogeography of Medusozoans

I am a graduate student co-advised by Dr. Cartwright and Dr. Collins and am lucky to be able to work at the University of Kansas as well as the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. I am interested in exploring the interface of systematics and biogeography for the CnidTol project. In my opinion, we know very little about species distributions and delimitations in the marine realm in general. In particualr, species' occurrence data in marine environments is often sparse due to the difficulties associated with sampling such vast environments. Here, ecological niche modelling represents a tool for inferring the distributions of suitable habitat for a species and thus species' potential geographic distributions. Such niche models can then be used to facilitate decisions on future sampling strategies and/or estimate the invasive potential of a species. In addition, ecological modeling in combination with phylogenetics enables us to make predictions about macroecological properties of taxa, such as the evolution of species' ecological traits.

As noted above, it is vital to know about the evolutionary relationships of the taxa in question to be able to study their biogeography and evolutionary ecology. Hence, phylogenetic analyses plays an important role in my research. For the CnidToL project I work on the phylogeny of two clades of medusozoans: the shallow water inhabiting box-jellyfishes (Cubozoa) and the open ocean Trachymedusae (Hydrozoa: Trachylina).