Biorepository Team

Research Interests: My primary focus in the last 15 years or so is diatoms. The long-term overall goal is to describe the benthic marine diatom flora of Guam and Micronesia.  I started out thinking that most of the species would have been described elsewhere already and I just had to find them in the literature, but it soon became clear that everything is not everywhere, that tropical marine diatoms were poorly studied, and that there are many new species to be discovered. Some can be distinguished with light microscopy (LM) with care and if one avoids the trap set by a strong distinctive character. Others can only be distinguished with scanning electron microscopy (SEM). Since 2009, my coauthors and I have described over 120 new species and 11 genera, but still probably less than one quarter of the species of Guam coral reef epiphytes can be identified and we have barely begun on other habitats such as mangroves and biofilm. We proceed haphazardly as suitable material is found. Presently we are focused on the taxonomy of the genus Mastogloia where there have been many misidentifications that confound biogeographic analysis. This is a global project involving already collaborators from the US East Coast and Italy, with the idea that each group will proceed with taxa they find, being in contact but not necessarily in collaboration with us, and that others will join us in their own ways. I also continue work on the genus Homoeocladia, where Matt Ashworth (U. Texas Austin) and I have named 30 species distinguishable only in SEM and are pursuing the possibility of species flocks across Micronesia with samples from Palau to the Marshall Islands (second large paper published open-access last year). A third ongoing subproject is the genus Licmophora, with 23 new species described over the last 15 years, including some from Australia, which accumulated evidence for regional endemicity in the genus. Many students from EPSCoR and the SEAS Alliance, and before them the LSAMP Alliance have worked on the projects and are coauthors of papers and species.

I also continue to have an interest in symbiotic ciliate-zooxanthellae partnerships, because a species I discovered in Guam in 2005 has become a model for the coral-zooxanthellae symbiosis. While such symbioses likely occur around the tropics, nobody is looking and only three are known, one seen in Florida in 1943 and not reported since, the other two in the same benthic marine habitat in Guam, where they are reliably accessible. Tingting Xiang (UC-Riverside) has successfully cultured the Euplotes uncinatus symbiosis and is doing genetic research on it with a grant that includes funding for UOG undergraduates to join in summer REUs.