High-resolution species biogeography of Larger Benthic Foraminifera from Raja Ampat (Indonesia) and the Indo-Pacific Ocean

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The Coral Triangle in the central Indo-Pacific is the hotspot for tropical marine biodiversity and has the worlds highest conservation priorities. Tropical marine biodiversity hotspots are moving through time and space and always coincide with major tectonic plate collisions, but the underlying evolutionary processes that promote species richness are still a matter of debate and in need of further investigations. Reef dwelling larger benthic foraminifera (LBF) are perfect proxy organisms for reefal development, diversity and evolution and are prominent ecosystem engineers involved in reef building and stability.This proposal is for the support of a 1 year project on high-resolution species biogeography of LBF from the Indo-Pacific as part of a PhD study on the extremely high diverse assemblages of benthic foraminifera from Raja Ampat (Indonesia). The study is the first large-scale foraminiferal study in this virtually unexplored region and therefore fills an important biogeographic gap of knowledge concerning processes generating species richness. It has been previously funded by a scholarship of the University of Bonn, that is limited for 2 years. During these 2 years we examined a) the foraminiferal species richness of assemblages from Raja Ampat, b) established a full documentation of the reefal faunal assemblages by scanning electron microscopy, and c) assessed the role of benthic foraminifera as ecosystem engineers. So far our results exhibit an extraordinary high species richness of both smaller and larger benthic taxa and give rise to the following new objectives, which will be worked on in the final year of this PhD research project: (1) Investigation of large-scale patterns of LBF species richness for the Indian and the Pacific Ocean and elaboration of a diversity gradient on species level for LBF to offer an updated high-resolution picture which includes the hotspot of tropical marine diversity for the first time, and comparison of our results to species-level biogeography patterns of scleractinian corals. (2) Revealing faunal similarities between the central Indo-Pacific benthic foraminiferal fauna and those of the Indian and Pacific Ocean. Thereby we expect to find support for one of the hypotheses concerning the processes generating species richness in the central Indo-Pacific.