Erin Grey

CV

Click here for Erin's student webpage

I am broadly interested in what determines the distribution and abundance of sessile marine invertebrates. For my thesis project, I am teasing apart the factors influencing the success of an invasive ascidian species, Botrylloides violaceous, in fouling communities along the Strait of Juan de Fuca, WA. Most ecological studies of invasive species are done on small scales at one location, so for this study I have chosen four sites with different abiotic and biotic variables in hopes of linking local ecological dynamics to broad-scale patterns of invasive species. I am particularly interested in whether biotic interactions, such as predation and competition with native species, have any affect on B. violaceous populations and whether this varies across the study sites.

I am also curious as to how the sessile organisms found in the fouling communities are able to coexist together, when they all seem to be competing for space. This appears to violate Gauss' classic "Rule of Competitive Exclusion" which states that when species compete for similar resources, the best competitor will drive all others to extinction. Luckily, today there are many coexistence theories which could explain coexistence in competitive communities. I will be using the observational and experimental data from this study to distinguish between 4 likely theories: differential predation, competitive intransivity, competition-colonization trade-off and temporal niche-partitioning via the lottery model/storage effect.

This research is funded by the Environmental Protection Agency's Science to Achieve Results Fellowship (FP-91631001) and the National Science Foundation's Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant (DEB-0608217).