RUI: NSF-BSF: PurSUiT:The Indo-Pacific zooxanthellate octocorals: an integrated approach to species delimitation, phylogenetics and biogeography

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Coral reefs provide food, livelihoods and coastal protection for more than 500 million people worldwide. Yet these ecosystems are among those most threatened, with some studies predicting that coral reefs may not survive into the next century. Efforts to understand the ways in which coral reef communities are changing are impeded by a lack of basic knowledge of the vast majority of the invertebrate animals that contribute to their structure and function. Additionally, changing ocean conditions appear to be shifting the dynamics between stony corals and octocorals in ways that will fundamentally alter the structure and function of reefs, as evidenced by Caribbean reef communities that are increasingly dominated by non-reef-building octocorals. Relative to the well-studied stony corals, however, little is currently known about the basic ecology of most octocorals, including how many and which species co-occur or how their populations vary over space and time, information that is necessary to determine which species may be imperiled by climate change and which may instead be benefitting. This lack of basic information is due in large part to the difficulty of distinguishing and correctly identifying octocoral species, coupled with a dearth of easily accessible resources to facilitate their identification. This project will address this fundamental problem by (1) combining molecular genetic analyses with high-resolution microscopy to discriminate species of octocorals collected from throughout the Indo-Pacific; (2) examining and re-describing historical specimens housed in major museum collections to facilitate the correct assignment of names to those species; and (3) compiling the information within a publicly accessible web portal that will allow users worldwide to generate species checklists and interactive keys for identifying reef-dwelling octocorals. The project represents a collaboration between researchers from the U.S. and Israel. Project participants include a post-doc, Israeli graduate students, undergraduates and high school students from underserved communities in the greater Los Angeles area.Delimitation and validation of shallow-water, zooxanthellate soft corals (families Alcyoniidae, Nephtheidae and Xeniidae) from across the Indo-Pacific (IP) will facilitate the identification of species in future studies of coral reef ecology and biodiversity, leading to increased understanding of the dynamics of coral reef communities in an era of severe deterioration due to global ocean change. DNA barcoding, target-enriched sequence capture of ultraconserved elements and exons, and documentation of morphological characters using high-resolution scanning electron microscopy will be integrated to delimit species among ~5000 specimens of soft corals currently available in museums as well as new collections from across the Indo-Pacific. Simultaneously, all available type material will be documented with modern imaging, re-described as necessary, and sequenced to facilitate assignment of correct (or new) binomens to species. Georeferenced, expert-validated specimen data will be compiled within a publicly available, searchable database with the capability to generate regional species checklists and interactive taxonomic keys. Recognition of species boundaries across the IP will enable the identification of geographic regions with high species richness, high endemicity or phylogenetically unique lineages that may merit special protection. Reconstruction of fully resolved phylogenies for the IP soft coral species will allow the testing of hypotheses about their biogeographic distribution and rates and timing of diversification in comparison to the ecologically similar scleractinian corals, contributing in general to our understanding of macroevolutionary processes in the IP as well as informing conservation and management strategies for reef biota.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.