Rescheduled (Date TBD)--Parasites as Indicators of Conservation

Parasites are often viewed in a negative light, but they make up a significant portion of community biodiversity and often link multiple species together. As a result, they can be highly informative to a multitude of conservation questions and issues, and can even be better indicators of ecological and evolutionary change than their free-living hosts. This talk will focus on two stories of parasites and conservation – one featuring “zombie crabs” and how parasites can be major drivers of host evolution in variable environments, and the second focused on the role that parasites can play in understanding changes to biodiversity within a restoration context. 

This program will be recorded and posted shortly thereafter here. Please note that closed captions will be available when watching the recording on YouTube, but not during the live presentation on Zoom.

About the Presenter

Dr. April Blakeslee is an Associate Professor of Biology at East Carolina University (Greenville, NC, USA), where her research and teaching interests are in conservation biology, marine ecology, invasion biology, parasitology, and evolutionary ecology. Dr. Blakeslee has published over 50 peer-reviewed papers and book chapters and serves as Deputy-Editor-in-Chief for the open-access journal, BioInvasions Records. She is also an Associate Editor for the journals Aquatic Invasions and Diversity and Distributions. She is an appointed US member of the Working Group on Introduction and Transfers of Marine Organisms (WGITMO) through the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES). She is currently serving as Vice President of the Eastern North Carolina chapter of Graduate Women in Science (GWIS). Prior to her appointment at ECU, she was an Assistant Professor at Long Island University-Post in Brookville, NY. Before that, she received two competitive Smithsonian Institution postdoctoral fellowship to work in the Marine Invasions Ecology Laboratory at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) in Edgewater, MD, where she performed research on marine invasive species and the role of parasites in those invasions. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of New Hampshire (Durham, NH, USA) where her research focused on marine evolutionary ecology, and a BA (concentration marine science) and MA in Biology (masters thesis on habitat fragmentation in Ovenbirds in suburban Boston) from Boston University (Boston, MA, USA).