Ecological factors driving diversity and distribution patterns in the placozoa

Placozoa是一种神秘的动物门，一直受到许多生物学研究领域的关注。Placozoans是唯一一种在生命周期和基本生态已知之前就已经完成基因组测序的动物。原因包括，这些动物代表了所有后生动物中最原始的群体，非常容易接受实验操作，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活体替代品。在这里，我们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其贫乏的知识之间的一些差距。具体来说，我们将描述placozoans的一些基本生态位参数，并解决广泛开放的扩散，地方性和同栖问题。我们在此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.