Research

Lab Environment

My lab consists of a collegial group of undergraduates who are committed to doing good science. Students typically begin by working on a project that I assign, but as they spend more time in the lab, they gravitate toward testing hypotheses of their own. Thus, students become involved experimental design, data collection and data analysis. Some students also work with me at the Friday Harbor Laboratories on San Juan Island, WA. All of us work on improving our communication skills by discussing our research in lab meetings, writing our results and attending conferences.

Promoting student involvement

I encourage undergraduates to join my lab. Nothing enlightens a beginner like practical experience. Most of you won't pursue careers in biology, but many components of my research offer practical experience important for anyone: you will learn to use and interpret statistics; understand how to organize research with a hypothesis, test, and revision; and you will learn elementary computer programming and database design which will help you compose their own programs and databases. The specific hypotheses that we test will foster an appreciation for the magnitude of geologic time, the long-term effects of natural selection and the origin of biodiversity. We can work together to subdivide projects into discrete problems that can be addressed during a single term. Students then have the chance to choose a smaller project that stimulates them. Both my scientific and educational research focus on evolution.

Evolutionary Research

I aim to test the hypothesis that large changes in shapes result from the same evolutionary processes that occur in populations. Consequently, I study why organisms change their morphology through time and space. Population biologists generally accept this hypothesis, but paleobiologists remain unconvinced that population-level dynamics can explain phenomena like mass extinctions and adaptive radiations involving hundreds of species. The interplay between small and large scales of evolution must be reconciled to understand the processes that formed Earth’s biological history, the stability of ecosystems, and the consequences of anthropogenic changes.

Because I study many geologic and geographic localities, I collect data from museum collections, the literature, and live specimens. I have developed methods for quantifying shapes and am well-versed in methods for comparing shapes statistically. Most of my work has involved sea shells, specifically snails from a group called neogastropods with thousands of species throughout the world’s oceans and a rich fossil record extending back at least 140 million years. Earlier research projects studied the functional morphology of different shell features (Price, 2003, Biol Bull), the effect of biases in the fossil record (Jablonski et al., 2003, Science), the phylogeny of a group of sea slugs (Price et al., in prep.), the morphological changes in neogastropods over the last 140 million years (Price, in prep.), and an assessment of the diversity of shell shapes in the North-Eastern Pacific (Price and Wagner, in review).

Currently, my main project aims to document the many ecological influences on the rate of shell growth in a morphologically variables species called Nucella lamellosa.

Energy trade-offs

A snail shell offers protection, and it is an effective product of evolution that has readily adapted to different ecological conditions over the last 500 million years. We can look at the shell as an evolutionary solution to an optimization problem: the shell has adapted as the best compromise among a series of conflicting selective pressures. However, surprisingly little is known about those selective pressures. The major aim of this research is to elucidate the role of abiotic and biotic environmental factors, such as erosion, temperature, density and season on the rate of growth in a species of marine snail called Nucella lamellosa.

Nucella lamellosa is ideal for studying the factors affecting shell growth. As in all snails, the shell records growth throughout life, and thus thin sections of the shell reveal an individual’s entire history. It also grows quickly in the lab (up to 205° in 6 weeks, personal observation), making it is feasible to study growth in a short time period. One well-studied tradeoff affecting shell growth in N. lamellosa is crab predation. Crabs crush shells, so individuals that grow in their presence of crabs have thick shell that require more force to crush; otherwise, shells are thin, presumably so that energy is redirected to address other, more pressing factors. Other factors could include temperature, reproduction, diet and wave action.

Four shells of N. lamellosa from San Juan Island, WA, arranged in order of increasing lamellosity.

 Figure 1. Variation within Nucella lamellosa in San Juan Island. The arrow indicates crab damage. The second specimen from the left is heavily pitted.


The energetic costs of depositing shell material fall into two categories: those addressing the rate at which shells grow, and those assessing the rate at which snails repair damage to their shells. Shell growth refers to growth at the aperture of the shell, and shell repair, refers to new shell material that is deposited on a damaged portion of the shell. Both types of shell deposition must be energetically costly, and studying these two categories will reveal how Nucella lamellosa allocates energy to the shell. I am exploring the effect of temperature, diet and erosion on shell deposition.

Educational Research

Some students have also been helping me research material that I incorporate into my classes. For example, one student is exploring the sexuality and biological accuracy of Robert Mapplethorpe's flowers. Her results will contribute to one of the lectures in the course The Visual Art of Biology.

Research