Anja Schulze, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Marine Biology
Texas A&M University at Galveston
5007 Avenue U
Galveston, TX 77551
Phone: 409-740-4540
Email: schulzea@tamug.edu
Research Interests
Research in my lab focuses on evolution and life history of marine invertebrate animals. Invertebrates include such familiar organisms as sponges, corals, clams, crabs, shrimps, sea urchins and sea stars, but also many unfamiliar ones, such as tiny zooplankton and many types of worms with cryptic lifestyles. The diversity of animal body plans in the ocean far exceeds that in terrestrial and freshwater environments.
A dredge full of invertebrates from the Atlantic coast of Florida
Some of the questions I am interested in are:
- How are different species related to each other?
- How did one body plan evolve from another?
- How do the animals reproduce, develop and disperse to distant geographic locations?
- How are they adapted to their respective habitats?
Polychaete and Sipunculan worms
My research concentrates on some of the more cryptic (but often surprisingly common) types of invertebrates.
Polychaete worms are represented by at least 10,000 species and range in size from microscopic to several meters in length. Some crawl around freely, some burrow into sand or mud, some are planktonic and some live in tubes attached to hard surfaces. Previous projects include the phylogeny of siboglinid polychaetes from hydrothermal vents and hydrocarbon seeps and the phylogeography of palolo worms. Click here for an introduction to palolo worms.
A palolo worm from Micronesia
Sipunculan worms, a.k.a. peanut worms or star worms are less diverse with only about 150 species. There are currently only a handful of scientists in the world who have any taxonomic expertise in this group. On the other hand, sipunculans are receiving a lot of attention lately due to their still mysterious evolutionary origins. I have reconstructed the phylogeny of the phylum by using a combination of molecular and morphological techniques.
Themiste alutacea, a sipunculan worm from Florida
Larval Biology
Many benthic invertebrates have complex life cycles that involve planktonic larval stages of microscopic size. Special techniques are often required to examine them, such as scanning electron microscopy and confocal laser scanning microscopy. My collaborators and I are currently documenting the morphological and genetic diversity of sipunculan larvae. We are also examining the development of their nervous and muscular systems which provides clues about their phylogenetic relationships.
Scanning electron micrograph of a sipunculan pelagosphera larva