Marine Sciences faculty tracks ancestry of decapods

Photo courtesy of Heather Bracken-Grissom.

Mariana Nava/Staff Writer

A University faculty member has made it her mission to track down the ancestry of certain groups of crustaceans.

“Assembling The Tree of Life” is a program sponsored by the National Science Foundation that is in charge of the research on morphology, fossils, development, behavior and interactions of all extant and extinct forms on earth and their relationship for over three decades; its main objective is to provide a clear understanding of these forms’ life history, and that will allow biology to move forward as well as give benefits to society as it goes on.

Heather Bracken-Grissom, assistant professor in the Marine Sciences Program and in the Department of Biological Sciences, got interested in helping with this project and started collaborating with the research on the relationship and origins of all decapods.

She is currently working on finding the relationship among crabs, lobsters and shrimp as well as their history of life.

“This is kind of a small snippet of a much larger initiative called ‘the decapods’ tree of life,’” said Bracken-Grissom. “So the goal of that study is to really understand the evolution of decapods as a whole.”

Bracken-Grissom pointed out that this was the very first comprehensive study of this type. It has taken around 30 years of collection and 5 years of study, which is still ongoing, as well as the collaboration of a lot of people to be able to include everything that was necessary.

“One of the really fun things about this was that as marine biologists, we integrated with paleontologists, and they were able to let us use their fossils to include in our study, so we were actually able to put a timing of when the first lobster actually originated and the history of life,” said Bracken-Grissom.

She said it was exciting to be able to estimate the origin of lobsters, which were estimated to be over 400 million years old according to the research’s results.

“We want to look across all decapods. Look at the evolutionary history and relationships of all lobsters, shrimp and crabs,” said Bracken-Grissom, regarding her next steps in research, which are based on expanding beyond lobsters and including other decapods.

Her research interests are driven by the evolution of marine invertebrates, which makes possible to apply issues that are related to their biodiversity, phylogeny, ecology, biogeography and conservation.

Also, Bracken-Grissom is carrying out a study about anchialine caves, which is based on the examination of the diversification, colonization, adaptation, and dispersal of the invertebrates that inhabit these caves, so it can provide a better understanding about the situation of these threatened communities.

She also was the lecturer in one of the Ocean Life Series events last semester, called “Deep Sea Mysteries: Monster Larva,” which was organized by the University’s School of Environment, Arts and Society. In this lecture, she discussed her findings in regards to an elusive larval creature with armor-like horns, which happened to be rarely seen and difficult to study.

Currently, Bracken-Grissom has been working on the exploration of visual systems and structures that take part in marine bioluminescence using transcriptomics, a set of transcripts in a certain organism.

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