Chak Lab

I am an evolutionary ecologist with interests in animal social behavior. My research focuses on a unique group of snapping shrimps in the genus Synalpheus that is emerging to be a powerful model to study the evolution of eusociality. Synalpheus shrimps are the only marine animals that are known to have evolved eusociality—an advanced social system that is found mainly in social insects like ants and bees. My dissertation research with Dr. J. Emmett Duffy has laid the foundation for long-term research on Synalpheus on aspects of their behavior, ecology, evolution, genomics, and symbiosis.

 

My research has broadened the understanding of animal sociality by investigating the unique sexual system of these animals. I showed that morphologically specialized workers can retain reproductive ability (Chak et al. 2015b). Also, I found that due to competition among females to be the dominant breeder, sociality consistently reduces sexual dimorphism across diverse animal lineages (Chak et al. 2015a). Further, my research resolves a long-standing debate on how eusociality evolved from simple society (Chak et al. 2017).

 

To understand the factors driving these evolutionary trends, I expanded my research to investigate the evolutionary history and ecology of sponges that host Synalpheus. I found that the diversification of Synalpheus is strongly tied to the phylogeny of their hosts, as well as the diverse symbiotic microbial communities in these sponges (in prep.). 

 

I was a Life Sciences Research Foundation Fellow at Columbia University, where I studied the genomic consequences of eusociality in Synalpheus, including how sociality affects genome size, historical demography, and the abundance of transposable elements. I developed a bioinformatic pipeline to estimate the abundance and diversity of transposable elements for organisms with large genome size in which performing whole-genome sequencing is not economical (Chak & Rubenstein 2019).

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At NJIT, I began to explore the mitochondrial and nuclear genomes of social snapping shrimps (Chak et al, 2020), as well as the morphological evolution in Synalpheus shrimps using micro-CT scanning. 

 

I have also worked on other projects related to phylogenetic diversity (Lefcheck et al. 2014), social recognition (Chak et al. 2015), bioerosion of corals (Dumont et al. 2013, Chak et al. 2016) and population genetics (Chak 2007).

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Undergraduate researchers in my lab often get started with the Genomics Education Partnership's (GEP) Pathways Project, annotating genes within the insulin signaling pathway across the Drosophila genus to understand the evolution and function of biological pathways.

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