SamGartner
I graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) with a Bachelor of Science with honors in Marine Biology in Spring 2017. While at UCSC as an undergraduate, I have had the opportunity to participate in three field courses and work with various marine animals. I have conducted projects on the antagonistic calls of male Northern elephant seals at Año Nuevo State Park, the behavioral ecology of octopus in Corsica, France, and the bottom-up controls within mangroves on Isla de San Jose in Baja, Mexico. Since March 2017, I have been working with the Mehta Lab conducting an independent project on the organ systems and scaling within moray eels. I will be presenting my independent project entitled “Comparative Organ Topology and the Organ Scaling within the California moray eel, Gymnothorax mordax” at the annual Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology conference this January (2018). I am broadly interested in functional morphology and biomechanics of feeding and locomotion within fish as well as the evolution of novel behaviors. I hope to continue my research in graduate school next fall (2018).