Dr. Jessica Bellworthy

I am a Postdoctoral researcher assessing how the parental environment influences the fitness of the offspring produced in reef building corals. Parental effects are ubiquitous in nature with multiple examples in marine invertebrates and may strongly influence species adaptation and persistence. However, parental effects are almost completely unexplored in corals which now face the challenge of surviving in a rapidly changing environment. Therefore, I will use multiple approaches including physiology, molecular, and microscopy to understand the mechanisms by which parental effects are produced in corals and explore how offspring phenotype changes along existing environmental gradients in nature.