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

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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.