Update!
Chris has moved on to a faculty position at the University of British Columbia.
His new lab webpage can be found here: Harley Lab
The following is his original Denny Lab website:
Chris went to school at Brown University (BS) and then went to more school at the University of Washington (PhD). To see what he worked on at U.W., click here. Now Chris is a post-doc in the Denny lab, which means that, because he has a Stanford student ID card, he is in the 24th grade.
Chris is interested in interactions between species, and how those interactions change as environmental conditions change. Right now, he and Mark are working on building a heat budget model for limpets, which are cone shaped snails that eat algae. Limpets live in the intertidal zone, but only in areas where they don't get too hot. Chris hopes to understand how temperature limits where limpets can live, and then predict where limpets might be in the future as global climate change heats up limpet habitats. He is also collaborating with Luke Hunt, who is asking similar questions of Endocladia, a turf-forming algae. Together, Chris and Luke are planning an experiment to see how much of Luke's algae is eaten by Chris' limpets. Once they know how the mighty, tyrannosauric limpets and the helpless algae interact with one another, along with how the distributions of both species will change with changes in the climate, then they should be able to predict what the high intertidal communities of grazers and algae will look like in the future. This information will be useful to people who will want to eat limpets in the future (...you'd be surprised...) and to people who want to protect both limpets and algae into the future by establishing coastal reserves. Plus, it's neat to be able to predict the future.
There are also innumerable side projects in which Chris is embroiled. He and James Lopez (in the Somero lab at Hopkins) know more about intertidal flesh-eating maggots than anyone is really entitled to know. He, along with Kate Smith (UCSB) and Vicki Moore (San Francisco State), is working on patterns of algal and snail biogeography. Chris and Brian Helmuth (University of South Carolina) and many others have collaborated on the effects of thermal stress on intertidal mussels and barnacles, and how temperature and time-spent-out-of-water sets the upper limits of these species on the shore.
Some of this stuff, as well as some other stuff, has been published. Below is a bibliography. All of the articles are available as pdf files. Send Chris an email (mogzilla@stanford.edu), and he'll happily send you an article. Or, you can go visit a library. It will build character.
Publications
Harley, C.D.G. & Bertness, M.D. 1996. Structural interdependence: an ecological consequence of morphological responses to crowding in marsh plants. Functional Ecology 10:654-661.
Paine, R.T., Ruesink, J., Sun, A., Soulanille, E., Wonham, M.J., Harley, C.D.G., Brumbaugh, D. & Secord, D. 1996. Trouble on oiled waters: lessons from the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Annu. Rev. Ecol. Syst. 27:197-235.
Levine, J.M., Hacker, S.D., Harley, C.D.G. & Bertness, M.D. 1998. Nitrogen effects on an interaction chain in a salt marsh community. Oecologia 117:266-272.
Harley, C.D.G. 2001. Environmental modification of biological interactions: a comparison across scales. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Washington.
Speidel, M., Harley, C.D.G., & Wonham, M.J. 2001. Response of the brown alga Fucus gardneri to a gradient of removal intensities. Aquatic Botany 71:273-280.
Harley, C.D.G. 2002. Light availability indirectly limits herbivore growth and abundance in a high rocky intertidal community during the winter. Limnology & Oceanography 47:1217-1222.
Helmuth, B., Harley, C.D.G., Halpin, P., O'Donnell, M., Hofmann, G.E., & Blanchette, C. 2002. Climate change and latitudinal patterns of intertidal thermal stress. Science 298:1015-1017.
Huey, R.B., Carlson, M., Crozier, E., Frazier, M., Hamilton, H., Harley, C.D.G., Hoang, A., & Kingsolver, J.G. 2002. Plants v. animals: do they deal with stress in different ways? Integrative and Comparative Biology 42:232-240.
Harley, C.D.G. 2003a. Species importance and context: spatial and temporal variation in species interactions. In Kareiva, P. & Levin, S.A. (eds), The Importance of Species: Perspectives on Expendability and Triage. Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ.
Harley, C.D.G. 2003b. Individualistic vertical responses of interacting species determine range limits across a horizontal gradient. Ecology 84:1477-1488.
Harley, C.D.G. & Helmuth, B.S.T. 2003. Wave exposure, thermal stress, and absolute vs. effective shore level. Limnology & Oceanography 48:1498-1508.
Harley, C.D.G. & Lopez, J.P. 2003. The natural history, physiology, and ecological impacts of the intertidal mesopredators, Oedoparena spp. (Diptera, Dryomyzidae). Invertebrate Biology 122:61-73.
Harley, C.D.G., Smith, K.F., & Moore, V.L. (in press). Environmental variability and biogeography: the relationship between bathymetric distribution and latitudinal range size in marine algae and gastropods. Global Ecology and Biogeography.
Denny, M.W., Helmuth, B., Leonard, G.H., Harley, C.D.G., & Hunt, L. (in press). Quantifying scale in ecology: lessons from a wave-swept shore. Ecological Monographs.
Wonham, M.J., O'Connor, M., & Harley, C.D.G. (in review). Providing a home away from home: native hermit crab use of non-native shells. Estuaries.