We have a new publication in Science Advances, an amazing collaborative body of work lead by the teams of Eric Schmidt and Toto Olivera at University of Utah. We are thrilled to be a part of this cute (and dramatic!) story of aggressive mimicry in cone snails, and how they use pheromones to trick worms like Platynereis to eat them. All the worm experiments to test reproduction behavior by administering cone snail small molecules were carried out at our lab.
Link to the research article: Small-molecule mimicry hunting strategy in the imperial cone snail, Conus imperialis
And some fun popular science media coverage of this story: