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Department of Biological Science, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306-1100 USA

Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre, Bamfield, British Columbia, V0R 1B0, Canada

Research

I am a member of the Levitan lab at Florida State University. I am interested in the factors that affect reproductive success in marine organisms and how this is distributed among a population. Many marine organisms exhibit high variance in reproductive success, which means that a few adults contribute a great deal to population growth, while others contribute little to nothing. The spawning success of an individual may be affected by the timing of reproduction in relation to the timing oceanographic events favorable to recruitment. Additionally, variation in habitat available for settling larvae may also affect offspring that survive to reproduce. My dissertation will employ the use of genetic markers in order to examine the recruitment dynamics and reproductive success in the black rockfish, Sebastes melanops.

For broadcast spawning organisms, reproductive success may also be affected by a variety of other factors, such as patterns of advection and diffusion around and between spawners, distance between spawners, and population synchrony. Currently I also have two other projects which reflect these interests. The first project is using a model of diffusion from a point source to describe the diffusion of gametes from a coral bundle. This model is being applied to examine the fertilization potential of bundles diffusing from a coral colony. My second project is looking for verification of the fluid-dynamic reciprocity hypothesis in marine organisms. This hypothesis has been developed for wind-pollinated plants such as pine cones, where wind tunnel experiments have shown that pollen landed on the cone of its species in higher densities more often than other types of pollen.

Peer-reviewed publications
1. Knox, R.S., D. Gülen, and K. E. Lotterhos. Effect of inhomogeneous broadening on the fluorescence anisotropy of a square-symmetric molecule. Chem. Phys. Letters 361 (2002) 285-290.
2. Lotterhos, K.E. and D.R. Levitan, in preparation for Biological Bulletin. Modeling dispersal of gametes from a coral bundle estimated as diffusion from a point source.

Other publications
1. Barber, J., and Lotterhos, K.E., 2007, Causes and costs of injury in trapped Dungeness crabs, in Piatt, J.F., and Gende, S.M., eds., Proceedings of the Fourth Glacier Bay Science Symposium, October 26–28, 2004: U.S. Geological Survey Scientific Investigations Report 2007-5047, p. 181-182.
2. Marine Ecology Research Group, University of Canterbury, New Zealand. Guide to the Species of Rocky Shores: South Island, New Zealand.

Contributed posters and talks
1. (Poster) Katie E. Lotterhos, Robert S. Knox, and Demet Gülen. Effect of inhomogeneous broadening on optical anisotropy in magnesium tetraphenyl porphyrin. Poster 13, Eastern Regional Photosynthesis Conference 19, Woods Hole, MA, Sat., Apr. 13, 2002.
2. (Poster) Katie E. Lotterhos, David R. Schiel, and Paul South. Investigating the role of consumer functional groups in the succession of an intertidal mussel bed. Benthic Ecology Conference, Québec City, Canada, March 8-12, 2006.
3. (Talk) Katie E. Lotterhos and Don Levitan. Can flow mediated by urchin spine morphology increase fertilization success? Western Society of Naturalists, Seattle, Washington, Nov. 9-12, 2006.
4. (Talk) Katie E. Lotterhos and Don Levitan. Broadcast spawners that poof: a model of turbulent diffusion from a point source applied to coral spawning in the field. Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, Jan. 3-7, 2007.