Dan Distel

The creature was tiny, about the size and color of a grain of rice. Dan Distel, director of the Ocean Genome Legacy Center at Northeastern University in Boston, wasn’t exactly sure what it was, other than a mussel of some kind. 

“I didn’t want to keep them in the freezer in my basement,” Dr. Litvaitis said of her flatworms, adding that blackouts are not uncommon in her New Hampshire neighborhood. She reached out to the Ocean Genome Legacy Center, a marine DNA genome bank near Boston that is part of Northeastern University, to see if it […]

At the time, Dr. Shipway was a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of the marine biologist Dan Distel at Northeastern University, part of which is safely housed in a former World War II bunker. Dr. Distel, the director of Northeastern University Ocean Genome Legacy Center and an author on the paper, studies shipworm symbionts, which are the […]

Shipworm reproduction has not been extensively studied, which prompted Shipway—and co-authors Nancy Treneman of the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology and Daniel Distel of Northeastern University—to deploy pine panels off the coast of Charleston, Oregon, in November 2016.  

But they entrusted this group of scientists, led by Dan Distel, a shipworm marine biologist and director of Northeastern’s Ocean Genome Legacy Center, with the highly guarded coordinates for that day’s expedition.   A front would arrive that afternoon, but during that narrow window on Tuesday morning, it was safe enough for the 46-foot ship to circle over the […]

Marine borers have plagued port cities around the world for centuries, according to Dan Distel, the director of the Ocean Genome Legacy Center at Northeastern University in Massachusetts.

Reuben Shipway and Daniel Distel of Northeastern University, members of the Philippine Mollusk Symbiont International Collaborative Biodiversity Group, went in search of the creatures with snorkeling masks and chisels in tow.

The discovery, which was reported in the journal PeerJ on Thursday, occurred during a feverish episode of wading through mangroves and scuba diving in coastal waters looking for wood that contained shipworm burrows. The [Northeastern] team brought their finds to the parking lot of a beachgoers’ hotel, where, wearing headlamps and wielding axes, they extracted […]