Asja Radja, assistant professor of physics at Bryn Mawr College, will visit campus to discuss her work in octocoral morphology.
Octocorals, “cousins” to the more well-known reef-building hard corals, have tree-like and mesh-like tissue networks that act as distribution networks for food between individuals within a colony. These tissue networks must efficiently route resources while simultaneously balancing the cost of building new materials and maintaining their infrastructure in the face of environmental changes, which constrains their spatial and topological organization. We compiled an image database of octocoral morphologies including extant species sampled from every octocoral order and several morphological variants of individual species. We then calculated geometric and topological metrics to quantify these morphologies and find that there are clear distinctions between how the two morphotypes balance building cost, efficiency and robustness. As a whole, this work demonstrates that directing our focus to not-well-studied network systems like those of octocoral morphology can bring forth novel information on network optimization and identify how relatively simple growth processes lead to optimized morphologies for survival.
Join us on Friday, April 10, for this exciting presentation from Asja Radja, assistant professor of physics at Bryn Mawr College. Lunch will be available in Hayes 216 from 11:45 a.m. to 12:15 p.m., and the presentation will begin in Hayes 211/213 at 12:10 p.m. We hope to see you there!