ABOVE: Mark Stone, University of Washington
Chelsea Wood once imagined she’d study dolphins, so it was a surprise, she says, to realize “there were much more charismatic things living inside the dolphins.”
As an undergraduate at Dartmouth University, Wood worked alongside James Byers, an ecologist then at the University of New Hampshire, who encouraged her to study parasites. “I went to his lab like a little mercenary trying to get marine biology experience, having little to no interest in the parasites,” Wood says. But along the way, she recognized how beautiful the freeloading organisms could be. For her undergraduate thesis, Wood studied how infection with a parasitic flatworm (Cryptocotyle lingua) changed the grazing habits of the marine snail Littorina littorea, and how those effects rippled through the local ecosystem.
After earning her bachelor’s degree in 2006, Wood spent two years as an editor of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, ...
