December 2nd, 2009 
San Francisco State University’s Romberg Tiburon Center is offering two student Research Assistantships to conduct research toward Master’s degrees on a project recently funded by the National Science Foundation. These assistantships will begin in the fall semester 2010, and are contingent on the students being accepted into the SFSU Masters program in Marine Biology.
This research will investigate feeding by copepod nauplius larvae, the most abundant metazoans in the sea. Comparative experiments and field-based measurements will contrast the food consumed, and the effects of food limitation, between nauplii and later life stages. A variety of techniques will be applied to account for the inevitable biases and limitations of each. These will include laboratory feeding experiments using cultured prey individually and in mixtures, and experiments using natural prey, with a variety of methods used to measure food consumption. Separate experiments will determine how nauplii and copepodites survive and grow at different concentrations of food.
Investigations of feeding by a predatory copepod (Tortanus dextrilobatus) will use molecular techniques to identify mitochondrial and nuclear DNA from diverse suspected prey species. Specific primers will be developed for common zooplankton species consumed by T. dextrilobatus in the laboratory.
One student will work predominantly on experimental approaches with Dr. Wim Kimmerer (PI), and one on molecular approaches to investigate feeding with Dr. Sarah Cohen (co-PI). However, both will gain experience with all techniques and we will all work as a team. Support will include a tuition waiver and a stipend.
Application deadline to Biology Department is 1 February 2010, see http://biology.sfsu.edu/programs/graduate
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