Nematode succession at deep-sea hydrothermal vents after a recent volcanic eruption with the description of two dominant
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Nematode succession at deep-sea hydrothermal vents after a recent volcanic eruption with the description of two dominant species Sabine Gollner & Maria Miljutina & Monika Bright
Received: 1 August 2012 / Accepted: 17 December 2012 # Gesellschaft für Biologische Systematik 2013
Abstract Nematodes are very common in the deep sea and are an important component of deep-sea hydrothermal vent communities. In early 2006, the eruption of the underwater volcano at 9°50’N East Pacific Rise wiped out almost the entire faunal communities of the area. This provided us with the opportunity to study nematode primary succession at vents as well as on adjacent seafloor basalt. Nematode abundance and richness were extremely low at all studied sites in late 2006 and 2007, and increased only slightly in 2009. Interestingly, the most abundant species during early succession were also prominent in this area prior to the eruption. Our results show that nematodes are extremely influenced by volcanic eruptions and need a long period of time to colonize the lava-flooded area in greater numbers and richness. We hypothesize that low food availability on the young bare basalt and harsh environmental conditions at early succession vent sites might hinder a more successful nematode establishment. In addition to the newly established active vent sites we also studied an inactive vent site that was not directly hit by the eruption but whose vent fluid had ceased after the eruption. At this inactive and older vent, diversity was also relatively low but was higher than at the younger, newly established sites. In addition to the ecological analyses, we here describe the two most abundant species found at inactive vents, namely Neochromadora aff. poecilosoma De Mann 1893 and Linhomoeus caudipapillosus sp. n. S. Gollner (*) : M. Miljutina German Center for Marine Biodiversity Research (DZMB), Senckenberg am Meer, Südstrand 44, 26382 Wilhelmshaven, Germany e-mail: [email protected] S. Gollner e-mail: [email protected] S. Gollner : M. Bright Department of Marine Biology, University of Vienna, Althanstrasse 14, 1090 Vienna, Austria
Keywords Nematode . Diversity . Succession . Deep-sea hydrothermal vents . Linhomoeus . Neochromadora
Introduction Nematodes are one of the most diverse and abundant metazoan taxa, occurring in terrestrial, freshwater and marine environments, from shallow waters to the deep sea (Giere 2009). A very high nematode diversity is found in deep-sea sediments. Other deep-sea settings such as vents, seeps or sea mounts harbor specific nematode assemblages and even increase the total deep-sea nematode diversity. However, many ecological deep-sea studies are at the genus level and/or the majority of the discovered new species remain undescribed (Miljutin et al. 2010; Vanreusel et al. 2010b, a). Besides the rarity of nematode studies at the species level in the deep sea, also studies on different time scales are scarce, although it is known that diversity and species composition can dramatically chang
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