Ecological factors driving diversity and distribution patterns in the placozoa

浮游动物门是一个神秘的动物门，一直受到生物学研究领域的广泛关注。在生命周期和基本生态学被了解之前，原生动物是唯一一种基因组已经被测序的动物。原因包括这些动物代表了所有后生动物中最原始的包氏体，非常适合实验操作，并且拥有最小的后生动物基因组，这被认为是祖先后生动物基因组的最佳替代品。我们在这里建议缩小我们在遗传学方面的广泛知识与在生态学方面的极差知识之间的一些差距。具体来说，我们将描述一些基本的生态位参数的盾形动物，并解决广泛开放的扩散，特有现象和同域问题。因此，我们利用现有的遗传知识和新的综合方法。

The enigmatic animal phylum Placozoa has been attracting much attention from many areas of biological research. Placozoans are the only animals where the genome has been sequenced before the life cycle and basic ecology have been known. Reasons include that these animals represent the most primitive of all metazoan bauplans, are extremely amenable to experimental manipulations and harbor the smallest metazoan genome, which is regarded the best living surrogate of an ancestral metazoan genome. We here propose to close some gaps between our extensive knowledge on the genetics on the one side and the extremely poor knowledge on the ecology on the other side. Specifically we will describe some fundamental ecological niche parameters for placozoans, and address wide open dispersal, endemism and sympatry questions. We hereby take advantage of the existing genetic knowledge and new integrative approaches.