Title: Trophic relationships in the benthos: feeding morphology and ecology of macroinvertebrates
Maya deVries is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at San José State University. Her lab integrates tools in animal behavior, biomechanics, stable isotope ecology, and engineering to uncover how morphological feeding specializations contribute to trophic dynamics and ecosystem function and to determine how global change may alter these form-function relationships. In this seminar, she will address these central questions by examining the role of a known predator with specialized morphology, the mantis shrimp, in the trophic ecology of communities. She will also approach the central questions from a more global perspective by determining common yet understudied organisms in marine communities, which are often missing links in food webs.
