Biogeography and genetic connectivity of members of the endofaunal gastropod family Naticidae in the Great Barrier Reef: Implications for their adaptive evolution, species patterns, and distribution"

该项目的目的是通过分析基因流动与大堡礁内生态因素和物种组成的相关性，了解动物群内腹足动物科Natiidae的适应性进化、物种形成和生物地理格局。尽管有一些涉及腹足动物家族的生物地理遗传研究，但还没有对同一地点的多个区系内物种进行系统采样。这里采用的多物种方法将允许在热带底栖生态系统的腹足类群内寻找共同的模式。目前已知只有Natiidae科的成员专门生活在沙地中，因此是一个理想的模式物种组，可以确定限制腹足类动物种群间基因流动的边界，确定生物地理格局和适应性进化的基本过程，并可能解释物种的系统发育关系。对软基蜗牛的分析将提供重要的补充数据，并将在很大程度上提高我们对海洋无脊椎动物基因流动和生态的认识。为此，将从整个大堡礁内的几个种群中获得生态、环境和分子数据。利用景观遗传学和地理信息系统(GIS)的方法，所产生的数据将有助于确定基因流动的边界，从而确定物种丰富的印度-太平洋地区自然种群的空间来源及其生物地理格局，这对保护地球上最重要的生物多样性中心之一的自然种群具有重大意义。

The aim of the project is to understand the adaptive evolution, speciation, and biogeographical pattern of the endofaunal gastropod family Naticidae by analyzing the correlation of gene flow with ecological factors and species composition within the Great Barrier Reef. Although there are some biogeographical genetic studies involving gastropod families, there has been no systematic sampling across multiple endofaunal species from the same locations. The multi-species approach applied here will allow searching for common patterns within the endofaunal gastropods of tropical benthic ecosystems. Only members of the family Naticidae are known to live exclusively within the sand and therefore represent an ideal model species group to identify boundaries that constrain gene flow between endofaunal gastropod populations to identify the basic processes underlying biogeographical patterns and adaptive evolution and may explain phylogenetic relationships of species. The analyses of soft substrate snails will provide important additional data and will improve our knowledge of the gene flow and ecology of marine invertebrates in a large scale. For this ecological, environmental, and molecular data will be obtained from several populations within the entire Great Barrier Reef. Using methods of landscape genetics and Geographical Information System (GIS) the resulting data will help to determine boundaries of gene flow and thus, the spatial origin of the naticid populations and their biogeographical pattern in the species-rich Indo-Pacific region that are of major interest for the preservation of natural populations in one of the most important centers of biodiversity on earth.