Gustavo Hormiga
George Washington University, DC·Ecology & Evolution
How can an animal spread across new lands and survive for hundreds of millions of years while its body barely changes? Velvet worms (Onychophora) are soft-bodied land invertebrates whose fossil record reaches back to the Carboniferous period.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Biology
Genetics
- Topics
velvet worms
Onychophora
Peripatidae
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Discover and formally describe new Neotropical velvet worm species in the family Peripatidae, combining high-throughput sequence data with modern morphological techniques to estimate the region's true species diversity.
- Generate high-quality onychophoran genomes and a UCE (ultra-conserved elements) probe set targeting about 1,000 DNA regions, usable on both fresh and museum-preserved specimens.
- Test hypotheses about Caribbean biogeography with the resulting family tree, including separate bursts of new species in Jamaica and Puerto Rico and the colonization of the Lesser Antilles.
- Assess the conservation status of Neotropical velvet worm species and link specimen images, videos and genomic data to a public specimen database.
More about the research
They have looked much the same for about 300 million years, which makes them a natural test case for how animals colonize new places over geological time without major changes in form. Because they are rare and live mostly in remote forests, they remain poorly known.
Why it matters
Many velvet worm species live in threatened remote forests and have never been described. Describing these species and assessing their conservation status could guide efforts to protect them. Public genomes, DNA probe sets and specimen databases will also give other biologists tools for studying the diversity and island history of rare invertebrates.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
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The school
George Washington University: 13 labs on PI Pages, $382M a year on research, 225 research doctorates a year.
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