Talk Title: "The Maintenance of Sex and Other Big Questions, Mostly in Snails"

I study the "why" of sexual reproduction, an evolutionary mystery that has fascinated biologists since Darwin. My lab group and I primarily use the New Zealand freshwater snail Potamopyrgus antipodarum as a model system because sexual and asexual lineages coexist in the wild, providing “natural experiments” that can illuminate the costs and benefits of sex. My research program brings together diverse approaches and perspectives to study sex, from ecology and behavior to genomics and physiology. I highlight recent work focused on identifying the genomic consequences of asexuality, including accelerated accumulation of harmful mutations and a marked expansion of repetitive rRNA and histone genes in asexual lineages. I also use these snails to study invasion biology and as ecotoxicology models, finding, for example, that invasive asexual lineages reach reproductive maturity faster and tolerate high population densities better than native ones, and that plastic pollutants affect sperm morphology. I close by discussing "metascience" initiatives that I play a leadership role in, with the goal of catalyzing and supporting a more open and inclusive scientific community.