DISSERTATION RESEARCH: Biogeography of Open Ocean Hydrozoans (Cnidaria: Medusozoa)

广阔的开放海洋可能为研究生物多样性和栖息在这一环境中的生物的分布带来障碍。为了解决这一问题，本论文的研究项目建议根据生物的生态需求修改现有的生物潜在分布建模方法。具体来说，生态位建模方法将用于研究物种在三维空间中的分布，考虑到垂直（深度）和水平（纬度和纵向）轴之间的相互作用。有待检验的假设是，深海开阔水域通过其环境的均匀性（例如，从热带地区到极地地区的深水温度较低），为生活在那里的那些物种的遥远种群之间保持连续性提供了一种手段，这导致了相对较低的物种多样性。相比之下，浅水环境是碎片化的，这导致种群之间的地理隔离，从而导致物种多样性相对较高。将生成潜在的分布模型，并使用分子遗传学对其预测进行测试。本项目将对开放海洋中的水生水母进行研究，通过将生态模型与分子分析相结合，该研究将有助于更好地理解开放海洋生物地理格局和生物多样性是如何产生和维持的。除了加深对开阔海洋环境的了解外，本科生还将有机会参与这个项目，让他们在正在进行的研究中获得实践经验。本次研究结果将通过国立自然博物馆桑特海洋馆的在线门户网站以及“装配刺胞动物生命之树”项目的项目主页与公众进行交流。此外，为该项目创建的策略和计算机代码将通过互联网提供给其他研究人员，收集的标本将存放在主要的公共博物馆。

The vastness of the open ocean can present obstacles for studying biodiversity and distributions of organisms that inhabit this environment. To address this issue, this dissertation research project proposes to modify existing methods for modeling potential distributions of organisms based on their ecological requirements. Specifically ecological niche modeling methods will be used to examine species distributions in three dimensional space, taking the interactions between vertical (depth) and horizontal (latitudinal and longitudinal) axes into account. The hypothesis to be tested is that deep open ocean waters, through their environmental uniformity (e.g., deep-water temperatures are low from the Tropics to the polar regions), provide a means for maintaining continuity among distant populations of those species living there, which results in relatively low species diversity. By contrast, shallow water environments are fragmented, which results in geographic isolation between populations and thus resulting in relatively high species diversity. Potential distribution models will be generated and their predictions tested using molecular genetics. Hydrozoan jellyfishes in the open ocean will be studied in this project and through integration of ecological modeling with molecular analyses the research should contribute to a better understanding of how open ocean biogeographic patterns and biodiversity are generated and maintained.In addition to furthering the understanding of open ocean environments, there will be opportunities for undergraduate students to partake in this project in order to give them hands-on experience in ongoing research. Results from this research will be communicated to the general public using the online portal of the Sant Ocean Hall of the National Natural History Museum, as well as the project homepage of the Assembling the Cnidarian Tree of Life project. Furthermore, strategies and computer code created for this project will be made available to other researchers through the internet and specimens collected will be deposited at major public museums.