vbaligaDoctoral Student
vbaliga “at” ucsc.edu

I am broadly interested in understanding the morphological diversity of cleaner fishes. The observation that cleaning has evolved several times independently across the evolution of teleost fishes provides me with the opportunity to test hypotheses about the degree of convergence for members of this functional group. In my research, I combine functional morphology and phylogenetic comparative methods to examine the structural and functional bases of cleaning behavior in several teleost clades from an evolutionary perspective.
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