The Hitchhiker's Guide to Terrestriality: Exploring Sea-to-Land Transitions in Decapod Crabs

Dr. Watson-Zink is driven to understand the ecological, evolutionary, and physiological contexts under which ancestrally marine animals colonized land across the history of life on Earth beginning over 300 millions years ago, and how these transitions produced the biodiversity patterns we currently observe in terrestrial environments. Her research focuses on decapod land crabs, which independently, and to varying degrees, colonized land more than 11 times in the past 66 million years. She aims to evolutionarily contextualize their many transitions, and to identify the genetic changes that allow the crabs to overcome the extraordinary adaptive challenges of life on land, while also creating novel genomic and transcriptomic resources to support future studies on the genetic underpinnings of terrestriality in this system.

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