Fall 2026 Environmental Sciences Seminar Series, Sam Bogan

The deep sea is Earth's largest and least-explored habitat, leaving much of its biology unknown. I will present two studies leveraging long-read sequencing to uncover the population dynamics and evolution of deep-sea vertebrates. First, we examined how deep-sea invasions constrained thermal adaptation in globally distributed fishes. Second, we reconstructed the demography and population health of elusive, deep-foraging whales. In these intractable but important systems, advances in long-read sequencing enabled previously unattainable biological insights.