Are microbial symbioses the key to land crab terrestrial invasions?
I am collaborating with Dr. Victoria Watson-Zink who is a postdoc at Stanford University and a Stanford Science Fellow. We both met at at UC Davis where we did our PhD work and also where we started our collaboration to study the gut microbiomes of crabs across a gradient of terrestriality. We are interested in looking for patterns of co-evolution and convergent evolution in the gut microbiomes of land crabs. Dr. Laetitia Wilkins at the Max Planck Institute in Bremen is also collaborating with us on this project.
Although much of Earth’s biodiversity currently exists on land, all life began in the oceans. Yet, sea-to-land transitions are rare and challenging. Crabs are one of the notable exceptions, with at least 12 lineages recently having independently colonized terrestrial environments. Compared to their marine counterparts that are omnivorous and consume mostly animal prey, seagrasses, and detritus, land crabs have adapted to eating land plants. However, land plants possess many complex structural polymers that make them difficult to digest (eg. lignin and lignocellulose). Our project uses metagenomic sequencing to investigate whether co-evolution occurred between proto-land crabs and lignin-digesting microbes in order to determine what role the microbiome may have had in the terrestrialization of these crabs.