UCSB students discover new crab egg predator

by Sonia Fernandez, UC Santa Barbara
March 16, 2026

After a year and a half of remote work and learning, UC Santa Barbara undergraduate students Sophia Lecuona Manos, Gabrielle Plewe, Carson Gadler and doctoral student Zoe Zilz returned to campus in late 2021 eager for some on-campus, hands-on research, an opportunity that was lost when COVID shut down universities and other public institutions in early 2020.

Little did they know that routine lab instruction in the class of parasitologist Armand Kuris would do more than make up for lost time — it would lead to the discovery of a new crab egg predator and a highly regarded paper in one of the field’s preeminent journals. It also turned them, along with new undergraduate Jaden Orli, into world experts on the newly discovered crab egg predator. 

“It was surreal,” said Lecuona. The discovery of this egg predator — a tiny crustacean called a nicothoid copepod — has major implications for local Santa Barbara- area crab fisheries, she noted; and the experience of finding and identifying this creature changed the course of her career for the better. “It gave me experiences that I wouldn’t have at that point that I could take into grad school,” said Lecuona, who has just completed a master’s degree in coastal resource management at UCSB’s Bren School of Environmental Science &  Management. 

The researchers’ work is published in the journal Ecology.

Keep reading: https://news.ucsb.edu/2026/022431/ucsb-students-discover-new-crab-egg-predator

Read the Ecology paper: https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecy.70263