Biogeography and genetic connectivity of members of the endofaunal gastropod family Naticidae in the Great Barrier Reef: Implications for their adaptive evolution, species patterns, and distribution"

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The aim of the project is to understand the adaptive evolution, speciation, and biogeographical pattern of the endofaunal gastropod family Naticidae by analyzing the correlation of gene flow with ecological factors and species composition within the Great Barrier Reef. Although there are some biogeographical genetic studies involving gastropod families, there has been no systematic sampling across multiple endofaunal species from the same locations. The multi-species approach applied here will allow searching for common patterns within the endofaunal gastropods of tropical benthic ecosystems. Only members of the family Naticidae are known to live exclusively within the sand and therefore represent an ideal model species group to identify boundaries that constrain gene flow between endofaunal gastropod populations to identify the basic processes underlying biogeographical patterns and adaptive evolution and may explain phylogenetic relationships of species. The analyses of soft substrate snails will provide important additional data and will improve our knowledge of the gene flow and ecology of marine invertebrates in a large scale. For this ecological, environmental, and molecular data will be obtained from several populations within the entire Great Barrier Reef. Using methods of landscape genetics and Geographical Information System (GIS) the resulting data will help to determine boundaries of gene flow and thus, the spatial origin of the naticid populations and their biogeographical pattern in the species-rich Indo-Pacific region that are of major interest for the preservation of natural populations in one of the most important centers of biodiversity on earth.