Jaymes Awbrey

While I am originally from a landlocked state, I developed two main passions as I grew up: animal diversity and a fascination with the water. These interests, along with some advice from my high school biology teacher, eventually lead me to pursue a bachelor’s in biology, and I included in my program an off-campus study semester at the Sea Education Association in Wood’s Hole, MA, where I learned about the oceans onshore before spending about a month on a ship sailing from Hawaii to Palmyra atoll, the equator, and back. The experience also included an independent science project on pteropod diversity across different water masses, which cemented my interests in biodiversity in marine systems. I decided to pursue a Master’s degree in the lab of Dr. Patrick Krug, where I worked on delimiting cryptic species of Oxynoe and Lobiger sea slugs, providing evidence to expand the known diversity of both genera. Following the completion of my Master’s, I moved on to a PhD at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in the lab of Dr. Scott France. My projects continued to explore marine invertebrate diversity in a new group: octocorals of the family Acanthogorgiidae. This group had long been a catch-all for some slightly odd morphologies of octocorals, and genetic evidence showed that this family is not monophyletic. My work comprehensively evaluated the group using genetic, genomic, and morphological data, and provided strong evidence for taxonomic revision of the group. After graduate, I continued the Instructor position I had at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette as well as joining the lab of Dr. Melissa Toups, an expert on sex chromosome evolution. My work in Dr. Toups’s lab has recently been investigating the evolution of a new sex chromosome in Aeshna juncea, a Holarctic dragonfly species. To better understand the evolution of this new chromosome, we have been sampling dragonfly larvae in Finland, Austria, and France and then using molecular barcoding to identify the species due to cryptic diversity in the larvae. In the future, I hope to continue to investigate in the former genera of Acanthogorgiidae as well as other groups.

Selected Publications

Awbrey, J. D. and S. C. France, 2025. Molecular Phylogenetics and Phylogenomics of acanthogorgiid octocorals (Cnidaria, Anthozoa, Octocorallia, Malacalcyonacea). Zootaxa. In review

Berriman, J. S., R. A. Ellingson, J. D. Awbrey, D. M. Rico, Á. A. Valdés, N. G. Wilson, A. Aguilar, D. G. Herbert, Y. M. Hirano, C. D. Trowbridge, and P. J. Krug. 2018. A biting commentary: Integrating tooth characters with molecular data doubles known species diversity in a lineage of sea slugs that consume “killer algae.” Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 126:356–370.

Goodheart, J. A., R. A. Ellingson, X. G. Vital, H. C. Galvão Filho, J. B. McCarthy, S. M. Medrano, V. J. Bhave, K. García-Méndez, L. M. Jiménez, G. López, C. A. Hoover, J. D. Awbrey, J. M. De Jesus, W. Gowacki, P. J. Krug, and Á. Valdés. 2016. Identification guide to the heterobranch sea slugs (Mollusca: Gastropoda) from Bocas del Toro, Panama. Marine Biodiversity Records 9:56.