RAPID: Diversity and symbiotic relationships of annelids in a poorly known region of the deep Pacific

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While the oceans occupy more than 70% of the Earth’s surface, the diversity of the deep-sea is still vastly understudied due to the difficult and expensive nature of sampling. Based on the limited sampling of the deep seafloor, researchers have found that biodiversity in these environments is dependent upon factors, such as temperature, salinity, geomorphology, and depth. One area lacking data is oceanic trenches which sometimes reach depths over 7,000m. Given the environmental extremes of oceanic trenches, they may harbor unique sets of species but biodiversity from these regions is almost completely unknown. Annelids, or segmented worms, are a diverse and dominant representative of communities in marine environments, including deep-sea habitats. However, limited sampling from the deep sea has restricted our ability to characterize annelid biodiversity from these widespread environments. In addition to exploring, describing and cataloging the biodiversity of annelid worms from the deep sea, this project will result in two new outreach activities. In collaboration with the MarineQuest program at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, two new outreach activities for K-12 students will be developed to illustrate life aboard a research vessel and how researchers study adaptations of organisms to life in the deep sea. This project will collect annelids from hadal sites of the Eastern Aleutian Trench in the Northeast Pacific Ocean and abyssal depths of the nearby continental shelf in the Bering Sea aboard the German R/V Sonne under the leadership of Dr. Angelika Brandt of The Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum. The samples will be preserved in formalin and RNAlater for morphological and molecular work, respectively. The goal is to document and describe annelid diversity and their symbionts from these remote and extreme environments using morphological and molecular sequencing techniques. Traditional taxonomy, fluorescence in-situ hybridization (FISH), and -omics techniques will be used to characterize annelid diversity in this relatively unstudied region of the deep-sea and determine if there is a greater abundance of symbiotic taxa in annelid microbiomes at hadal depths compared to abyssal depths.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.