🕷On Thursday, March 11th at 2:30pm ET, we welcome onto the Bugscope: Dr. Darko Cotoras!

”Stories of Traveling Spiders”

Darko D. Cotoras is a Research Associate at the California Academy of Sciences. His main research interest is on the historical processes that create biodiversity in conditions of isolation. He focuses on invertebrates from islands in the Pacific Ocean. On his research, he integrates field and museum work with phylogenetics, population genetics and genomics. He did a post doctorate between the California Academy of Sciences and the University of California, Santa Cruz. Previously, he earned a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley and a Master in Ecology and Evolution at the Universidad de Chile. In this last institution, he also did a Bachelor in Biology. Soon he will begin as a Humboldt postdoctoral fellow at the Senckenberg Museum.

He published a paper recently examining whether the differences in web designs of a spider species was due to behavioral plasticity (ability for the species to change web design depending on location) or due to the spiders actually being multiple species spiders. The spider lives on Isla de Coco, an island located 342 mi off the south west coast of Costa Rica.

Check out Darko's research profile: https://www.calacademy.org/staff/ibss/entomology/darko-d-cotoras

LINK TO THE BROADCAST: https://happs.tv/post/0T5pI6HXXKoMFNa0I0SF

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