An inverse latitudinal biodiversity pattern in asellote isopods (Crustacea, Peracarida) from the Southwest Atlantic betw
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ORIGINAL PAPER
An inverse latitudinal biodiversity pattern in asellote isopods (Crustacea, Peracarida) from the Southwest Atlantic between 35° and 56°S Brenda L. Doti & Daniel Roccatagliata & Juan López Gappa
Received: 3 June 2013 / Revised: 10 September 2013 / Accepted: 24 September 2013 / Published online: 24 October 2013 # Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013
Abstract A distinct trend of decreasing biodiversity from the tropics to the poles is well-known for terrestrial organisms. This pattern, however, is less clear in marine systems. In the present study, an inverse latitudinal biodiversity pattern is reported for the asellote isopods from Argentina. Species richness is shown to be about six times higher in the Beagle Channel and southern Patagonia, i.e., south of 47°S, than north of this latitude. This high species richness of Asellota south of 47°S seems to be related with the predominance of gravelly bottoms in the southern Patagonian shelf and also with the tectonic history of the southern tip of South America. Inverse latitudinal gradients had been reported previously for echinoderms, bryozoans, sponges, amphipods and macroalgae from the southern Southwest Atlantic. Based on unpublished new records and information gathered from the literature, a database summarizing the distribution ranges of the Asellota along the coast of Argentina was compiled. A total of 108 species was recorded and the distribution records of this fauna were increased by 36.15 % (260 and 354 before and after our surveys, respectively). Keywords Asellota . Isopoda . Species richness . Latitudinal biodiversity pattern . Argentina B. L. Doti (*) : D. Roccatagliata Instituto de Biodiversidad y Biología Experimental y Aplicada (IBBEA), Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Ciudad Universitaria, C1428EGA Buenos Aires, Argentina e-mail: [email protected] J. López Gappa Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales (MACN), Ángel Gallardo 470, C1405DJR Buenos Aires, Argentina B. L. Doti : D. Roccatagliata : J. López Gappa Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET), Buenos Aires, Argentina
Introduction The literature of the asellote from the southern tip of South America is scarce and the majority of the records of this fauna is restricted to three areas: the Malvinas Islands, the Straits of Magellan and the Beagle Channel (see Nordenstam 1933; Winkler 1994; Brandt et al. 1999; Doti et al. 2005). No study dealing with the biodiversity pattern of the asellote isopods along the coast of Argentina has been published until now. On the contrary, the biodiversity patterns of other benthic marine groups from Argentina such as echinoderms, decapods, bryozoans, poriferans, amphipods and macroalgae have been analyzed (see Bernasconi 1964; Boschi 2000a, b; López Gappa 2000; López Gappa and Landoni 2005; López Gappa et al. 2006; Liuzzi et al. 2011). In all the above mentioned groups, with the noticeable exception of decapods (Boschi 2000a, b), the bio
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