Crinoid diversity and their symbiotic communities at Bangka Island (North Sulawesi, Indonesia)
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Crinoid diversity and their symbiotic communities at Bangka Island (North Sulawesi, Indonesia) Riccardo Virgili 1
&
Carlo Cerrano 1,2,3,4 & Massimo Ponti 2,4,5 & Markus T. Lasut 6 & James D. Reimer 7,8
Received: 15 February 2020 / Revised: 18 May 2020 / Accepted: 25 May 2020 # Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung 2020
Abstract Members of the order Comatulida (Echinodermata: Crinoidea) are widely distributed on Indo-Pacific reefs, where they host a highly diverse and understudied cryptofauna, which makes them a potential source of hidden biodiversity. In this study, shallowwater crinoid populations and their symbiotic communities from the Bangka Archipelago (North Sulawesi, Indonesia) were investigated. Presence and diversity of the symbionts, focusing on their host selectivity patterns, were assessed. A total of 39 comatulid species belonging to six families were found. Overall, symbiont fauna included 70 species belonging to 11 families within eight orders. The results showed variable host specificity among symbionts’ families, and patterns correlated with host size for some symbiont taxa. This study provides the first baseline dataset of crinoid assemblages and their symbiont diversity in the understudied region of North Sulawesi, within the Coral Triangle. Keywords Comatulida . Feather star . Symbiont . Cryptofauna . Biodiversity . Echinodermata . Palaemonidae
Introduction Feather stars, crinoid members of the order Comatulida that lose their stalk following the postlarval stage, are widespread and abundant in many tropical reef benthic communities (Messing 1997, 2007). Their ecological success is mainly due to their unpalatability to most durophagous fishes (McClintock et al. 1999; Kasumyan et al. 2020) and also to an efficient suspension collecting apparatus that constitutes the majority of the body. Due to these characteristics, crinoids, and in particular tropical shallow-water feather stars, are well known to host a very diverse
epifauna, which can profit from associations via feeding and sheltering opportunities. The partial isolation given by the host and the creation of a microhabitat on the host itself can allow crinoids to be considered as a living substratum, which creates small unique communities characterised by crinoid-symbiont and symbiont-symbiont interactions (Britayev et al. 2016; Deheyen et al. 2006; Rohde 1984). However, the study of these symbiont communities needs to be related to host diversity. In fact, the majority of symbiont studies have been focused on host comatulids with variable host identification accuracy, which has prevented a clear overview of these communities (Britayev et al.
Communicated by S. Stöhr * Riccardo Virgili [email protected] 1
2
Dipartimento di Scienze della Vita e dell’Ambiente (DiSVA), Università Politecnica delle Marche, Via Brecce Bianche sn, 60131 Ancona, Italy Consorzio Nazionale Interuniversitario per le Scienze del Mare (CoNISMa), Piazzale Flaminio 9, 00196 Rome, Italy
3
Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn, Naples, I
