University of the Sunshine Coast visit

This weekend I took the train up the the Sunshine Coast to visit Dr. Leslie Brooker. Among other things, Lesley is an expert on chiton radula biomineralization. Aside from giving me innumerable pieces of good advice on my research, Lesley hooked me up with a large body of literature on molluscan biomineralization and pointed me towards some good books on chitons that I need to get my hands on.

Chitons of the World is a really lovely book
illustrating hundreds of chiton species

Lesley and her husband Keith (and pup B.J.) took me to a rocky platform near Beacon Lighthouse. Lesley told me this was a good place to find Acanthopleura gaimardi, a species I'm considering working on, and she wasn't kidding. Nearly every crack in the rock was full of them! We also found several specimens of Onithochiton and one specimen of Callistochiton.

A crevice full of Acanthopleura gaimardi

Callistochiton sp.

Onithochiton sp.

Epimenia - but not the one you think

There comes a time in every scientist's life when he or she has to start thinking about the important things. Not "What questions do I want to ask with my research?" or "What is the utility of my research to mankind?" but "What naming scheme am I going to use to name the computers and equipment in my lab? Animal genera? Star Wars characters?" I was recently faced with this important question.

Meet my snazzy new laptop, Epimenia (animal genera it is). I do a lot of bioinformatics and wanted to have a Linux-based laptop that is powerful enough to handle most of my data processing (but not assembly or phylogenetic analysis) needs. I decided to go with the System76 Kudu Professional. The base model isn't bad but I opted to go with an Intel Core i7-4800MQ Processor (2.7 GHz 6MB L3 Cache - 4 Cores plus hyperthreading) CPU, 16 GB of RAM, a 480 GB solid state mSATA boot drive, and a 1 TB SATA III hybrid hard drive with 8 GB solid state buffer. This thing is fast and so far I'm loving it!

I'm currently using this bad boy/girl (solenogasters are hermaphroditic) to implement the internode certainty and tree certainty indices of Salichos and Rokas 2013, which I plan to include in our upcoming paper on Aplacophoran phylogeny based on transcriptome data. More on that soon!

Acanthopleura gaimaridi

This weekend my roommate Rob, a couple of his friends, and I went on a Road trip up to Noosa National Park. While there we went to Tea Tree Bay beach and Alexandria Bay beach (which turned out to be a clothing-optional beach but that's another story). The rocks at both sites were home to the chiton Acanthopleura gaimardi! This is a close relative to a species I know well from the Florida Keys and is possible I species I will be studying while here.

A genuinely candid photo of me showing Rob Acanthopleura gaimardi
(photo by Anna Csergo).

Acanthopleura gaimardi. This specimen is about 4 cm in length.

Aculifera = Aplacophora + Polyplacophora (chitons)

The Aculifera hypothesis unites the molluscs that possess sclerites by placing Polyplacophora as the sister taxon of Aplacophora. Aculiferans are the sister group to all other living molluscs so this group is important to study in order to understand the evolution of Mollusca as a whole. Molluscs are interesting to researchers because many species are economically important and food, producers of pearls and shells, and as invasive species or biofoulers. Plus they're ace (ace is Australian slang for cool, I'm really not kidding about this cheesy crocodile hunter parody)!


The worm-like aplacophoran molluscs are exclusively marine animals characterized by a narrow or completely reduced foot, a unique dorsoterminal sensory organ, and a small mantle (=pallial) cavity restricted to the posterior-most part of the body. As the name suggests, aplacophorans completely lack a shell. Instead, they are covered in a dense coat of spiny and/or scale-like calcareous sclerites. There are two distinct lineages of aplacophorans: Caudofoveata (also called Chaetodermomorpha) and Solenogastres (also called Neomeniomorpha). Although unfamiliar to even many zoologists, many of the roughly 400 described species of aplacophoran molluscs are important members of many marine benthic communities.

Cavibelonia sp. (Aplacophora, Solenogastres) collected recently during

an expedition in Antarctica. Anterior is to the left.

Polyplacophorans, or chitons are slug-like animals with eight plates covering their backs. These plates overlap somewhat at the front and back margins and articulate with each other to form a flexible dorsal armor. This allows chitons to be flexible, presumably an adaptation for living in the rocky intertidal as many species do. The shell plates are surrounded by mantle tissue bearing sclerites like those found in aplacophorans. Currently around 1,000 species of chitons are described.

Lepidopleurida sp. (Polyplacophora) collected recently during an expedition
in Antarctica. I'm not sure if this is a juvenile or just a really tiny species.
Anterior is to the right.

G'day!

G'day! First thing's first: if you didn't think this was going to be my attempt at a cheesy parody of Steve Irwin's The Crocodile Hunter, you're gravely mistaken. If you read the text of this blog in an American's lousy attempt at a Queensland accent, you'll be adequately in on the joke. For the record, I'm doing this because I think Australians are awesome and I want to be like them, not because I am making fun of them.

Now that that's out of the way, let me begin... My name is Kevin Kocot. I recently finished my Ph.D. at Auburn University in Ken Halanych's lab studying molluscan phylogeny and evolution. I also did a short postdoc in Ken's lab working on basal metazoan phylogenomics, but you're here for the molluscs now aren't ya? Good on ya (see, that's something Australians say). I've just moved to Brisbane Australia to start an NSF International Postdoctoral Fellowship-funded project in Bernie Degnan's lab. I'm going to keep this blog short and sweet and mostly academic but I won't be able to keep some of my observations about life in Australia to myself. So far I'm simply loving it here. Brisbane is a great city. It's big but not as big as I imagined. I arrived on January 4th and it hasn't taken me long to get settled. I'm living in a beautiful apartment right on the Brisbane River directly across from The University of Queensland St. Lucia campus where I'll be working.