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Kari L. Lavalli
 Kari
Lavalli was born in Michigan and grew up in a suburb of
Detroit, but one that was surrounded by a woods. She tortured
her parents by capturing every possible creature she could
and bringing them into the house. Thus she was destined
to do something that involved animals. At first she thought
that would be veterinary school, but after taking an animal
behavior course in Woods Hole in her sophomore year of
college, she became more and more interested in pursuing
research. Nonetheless, her path to lobsters was torturous.
First she studied the sensory biology of homing pigeons,
then the biological models that people use to predict whale
populations that sustain fisheries in Japan, then the mating
behavior of butterflies, and finally the behavioral ecology
of lobsters. She has a B.A. from Wells
College, a Ph.D in Biology from the Boston
University Marine Program in Woods Hole, MA and has
completed two postdoctoral fellowships--one at Northeastern
University's Marine
Science Center and one at the University
of Haifa, Haifa, Israel as a Fulbright Fellow. Her
graduate school publications focus on the feeding mechanisms
of newly settled lobsters, while her post graduate publications
focus on the internal feeding structures of lobsters, the
role of lobster hatcheries in research and reseeding efforts,
general ecology and behavior of lobsters, and the antipredator
mechanisms of adult lobsters. For 4 years, she worked as
an Assistant Professor at Southwest
Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas, expanding
and running their marine program as well as offering animal
behavior and behavioral ecology courses. Her teaching skills
earned her a teaching award in the School of Science. While
there, she pursued her interests in slipper lobster morphology
and feeding behavior as well as the evolution
of gregariousness in spiny lobsters for the purpose of
cooperative defense (with collaborator William Herrnkind).
She now splits her time between teaching part-time, participating
in Florida State University's inservice program for K-12th
grade science teachers (Marine Biology for Teachers,
A Model for Inquiry-Based Teaching), and pursuing further
clawed lobster research with The Lobster Conservancy and
further spiny
lobster research with her colleagues in Florida.
Feel free to email
me.
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