Daniel Speiser

Biography

Dr. Daniel Speiser is currently working as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology, University of South Carolina, United States of America. His research interests include Biological sciences. He is serving as an editorial member and reviewer of several international reputed journals. Dr. Daniel Speiser is the member of many international affiliations. He has successfully completed his Administrative responsibilities. He has authored of many research articles/books related to Biological sciences.

Research Interest

The Speiser Lab works with invertebrate animals because of their diverse phenotypes and because it allows us to target taxa specifically well-suited for particular questions. For example, we study the function and evolution of the eyes of scallops, a family of swimming bivalves. The eyes of scallops are single-chambered like the camera eyes of vertebrates and cephalopods, but use a mirror for image-formation instead of a lens. We also study certain chitons (Mollusca: Polyplacophora) that have hundreds of eyes embedded in their dorsal shell plates. These unique shell-eyes are the only eyes known to form images using lenses made of solid aragonite and they may be the most recently evolved eyes of any animal. Using these separate instances of eye evolution in mollusks, we are also investigating the co-evolution of spatial vision and complex brains. Although much of our current work concerns the visual systems of mollusks, the Speiser Lab welcomes proposals for any new projects or collaborations centered on the evolutionary physiology or visual ecology of invertebrates.