Growing up in the mountains of western North Carolina, Jeb Byers always spent his fair share of time in the outdoors. He loved running, playing with neighborhood friends, or just hiking, surrounded by nature.
When he began pursuing his undergraduate degree at Duke University, that love pushed Byers toward biology. In the fall of his junior year, he took a semester away to study on the coast at the Duke Marine Lab. There, he pursued his first independent research project and took a class on invertebrate zoology.
“It was a small class, and we had a partner and this aquarium sitting right in front of us,” recalled Byers, Athletic Association Professor in the Odum School of Ecology. “We would go out collecting organisms and put them in our tank. I thought, man, this was a horrible idea because we’d be (too distracted by the aquarium), but that was kind of the point.”
Instead of a distraction, the hands-on observations proved fertile ground in which to sow new ideas and fascinations. That taste of research transitioned to a zoology degree at Duke and a new interest in marine ecology that Byers has parlayed into a successful academic career.
In 2024, Byers was named a UGA Distinguished Research Professor, recognizing a litany of work quantifying and predicting success of biological invasions. He spoke with Research Communications about his interests, research, and opportunities for impact in the future.
Research Communications: Tell us about that first independent research project. Do you remember what you studied?
Byers: I worked on the levels of heavy metals in an oyster and a snail. I looked at zinc, copper, and lead, because each of those has different ways they act in the environment. I looked at an oyster and a snail because they’re both mollusks, but one is sessile—it doesn’t move. I was comparing between marinas and open water environments with the hypothesis that you would see more of these heavy metals in the marinas, because that was where all the nasty stuff was running off.
It was a simple project, but actually a pretty good one for someone starting out. A year or so after I graduated, one of my professors encouraged me to get it published, which it was, and that was sort of my first taste of academia.
Did that give you a bit of the research bug?
Yeah, I was glad I saw that through, and I’m sure that experience helped me a lot down the road. I didn’t go right into research, though, after I graduated. I took a year and taught English in South America.
That’s a bit different than marine ecology. What exactly did you do down there, and were there any takeaways you were able to eventually apply to your academic career?
It was a program with WorldTeach, and it was a one-year commitment. I was placed in this agricultural high school way out in the middle of the country (in Ecuador). I was pretty isolated, but it was a very rewarding experience. I learned a lot about the culture and language, and it did give me some experience as a teacher. I also still use my Spanish a lot, doing work in Latin America.
So, fast forward to now. You’re doing research into invasive species. What attracted you to this field of study, and why do you consider it such a vital piece of research?
When I was entering grad school in the early 1990s, it was just starting to become an area of concern. Things like kudzu and zebra mussels were pretty well known, but the field wasn’t really well-formed at the time. It seemed like an area of particular need. There are species that spread globally for several reasons, sometimes accidentally, and when those species come into new systems, some can impact populations or communities of those native systems. We tend to see the bad examples, like kudzu. But there are other invaders that are less conspicuous but equally problematic.
But it’s interesting because, if you go to China and find kudzu, it doesn’t take over the system the way it does in the United States. And if you look at zebra mussels, which are native to the Caspian Sea, and see how they invade the Great Lakes, they clog intake pipes and you’re constantly shutting down power plants to scrape them clean. They have biodiversity effects because they’re outcompeting the native mussels and clams.
There are other examples too. The U.S. West is loaded with invasive weed species, some of which are very competitive, taking over the whole system. One in particular, cheatgrass, is very flammable, and those ecosystems are burning now about twice as frequently as they used to.
So, you have these species that have extreme economic and ecological impacts, and we’re trying to understand why various species act the way they do in one environment as opposed to another.
As part of your current work, you have developed a heat map of the world’s oceans indicating where invasive species are having the most success. Can you share a bit about that?
In my first faculty job at the University of New Hampshire, I met a physical oceanographer named Jamie Pringle. I connected with him on a project that looked at an invasive snail, which was moving up the coast. I wondered whether its rate of expansion made sense, given oceanographic currents there. So, we started that project and quickly realized that the issue was much more interesting than just a single snail species—it examined how species invade and spread in the ocean, because it’s very different from land or even a pond.
In a pond, there’s nothing working against the species. There’s no current. If you’re in a river, it’s different, because now it really depends whether you’re trying to go upstream or downstream. If you’re going downstream, invasion is a piece of cake. Upstream is really hard. So, that got us thinking about the ocean. Could we go to every coastline in the world and determine whether that part of the coastline acts more like a pond or a river?
We’ve basically been working on this project for 20 years, and a few years ago the oceanographic models were finally advanced enough. Once we started doing it, we realized the problem was even richer than we thought. There are so many permutations to examine—do the larvae used in the study have any chance there? Is there sensitivity at this spot to the depth, gestation duration, or seasonality? If they were deeper, or it was in the water for shorter duration, or if the larvae were spawned in August instead of January, what impacts would that have? It’s called a sensitivity analysis.
What’s the implication?
From an applied perspective, a map like this gives you some idea about where you need to pay attention. If you’re in an area that’s hard to invade, you may say you don’t need to be quite as cautious as you should be in an area where the physics are more permissible to invasion—the pond-like areas of the coast.
It also just tells us a lot about life history. You might find a reduction in the number of species that use larvae to reproduce in that area, maybe the conditions aren’t favorable for larvae to retain.
Finally, it’s part of a broader phenomenon we call physical-biological coupling—recognition of the physics (of the ocean) and how it interacts with larvae. In the ocean, physical-biological coupling is important because it provides insights into productivity, biodiversity, ecosystem dynamics, and potential impacts on climate.
