MCZ Lunchtime Seminar

The Hitchhiker's Guide to Terrestriality: Exploring sea-to-land transitions in decapod crabs

Victoria Watson-Zink
Postdoctoral Scholar
Stanford University

Dr. Victoria Watson-Zink is driven to understand the evolutionary contexts under which ancestrally marine animals colonized land across the history of life on Earth and how these transitions govern historical and contemporary patterns of biodiversity. Her work primarily focuses on the decapod land crabs, which have independently and convergently colonized land at least 17 times. Dr. Watson-Zink’s doctoral work aimed to evolutionarily contextualize their many transitions and to identify the genetic and physiological changes that have allowed the crabs to overcome the extraordinary adaptive challenges of a life on land. As an HHMI Hanna Gray Fellow at Stanford University, previously jointly funded by the Stanford Science Fellowship and the NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology, she is now working to establish vampire crabs (Geosesarma) as a new model system for exploring terrestrial adaptation in crabs from a developmental perspective. During this seminar, Dr. Watson-Zink will discuss her previous studies on the transcriptomic responses of land crabs to desiccation stress and the convergent evolution of symbiotic lignocellulose degradation in land crabs, as well as her current work charting gene expression changes through ontogeny in vampire crabs with different modes of development.