DISSERTATION RESEARCH: Biogeography of Open Ocean Hydrozoans (Cnidaria: Medusozoa)

广阔的公海可能会给研究生物多样性和栖息在该环境中的生物的分布带来障碍。为了解决这个问题，本论文的研究项目提出了根据生物的生态需求来修改现有的生物潜在分布建模方法。具体而言，将使用生态位模拟方法来研究物种在三维空间中的分布，同时考虑垂直(深度)和水平(纬度和经度)轴之间的相互作用。需要检验的假设是，深海开阔水域通过其环境一致性(例如，从热带到极地的深水温度较低)，提供了一种维持生活在那里的那些物种的遥远种群之间的连续性的手段，这导致了相对较低的物种多样性。相比之下，浅水环境是支离破碎的，这导致种群之间的地理隔离，从而导致相对较高的物种多样性。将生成潜在的分布模型，并使用分子遗传学来检验它们的预测。这个项目将研究公海中的水母，通过生态学建模和分子分析的结合，这项研究应该有助于更好地理解公海生物地理模式和生物多样性是如何产生和维持的。除了加深对公海环境的理解外，本科生还将有机会参与这个项目，以便在正在进行的研究中获得实践经验。这项研究的结果将通过国家自然历史博物馆圣海大厅的在线门户网站以及组装北欧生命树项目的项目主页向公众公布。此外，为该项目创建的战略和计算机代码将通过互联网提供给其他研究人员，收集的标本将保存在主要的公共博物馆。

The vastness of the open ocean can present obstacles for studying biodiversity and distributions of organisms that inhabit this environment. To address this issue, this dissertation research project proposes to modify existing methods for modeling potential distributions of organisms based on their ecological requirements. Specifically ecological niche modeling methods will be used to examine species distributions in three dimensional space, taking the interactions between vertical (depth) and horizontal (latitudinal and longitudinal) axes into account. The hypothesis to be tested is that deep open ocean waters, through their environmental uniformity (e.g., deep-water temperatures are low from the Tropics to the polar regions), provide a means for maintaining continuity among distant populations of those species living there, which results in relatively low species diversity. By contrast, shallow water environments are fragmented, which results in geographic isolation between populations and thus resulting in relatively high species diversity. Potential distribution models will be generated and their predictions tested using molecular genetics. Hydrozoan jellyfishes in the open ocean will be studied in this project and through integration of ecological modeling with molecular analyses the research should contribute to a better understanding of how open ocean biogeographic patterns and biodiversity are generated and maintained.In addition to furthering the understanding of open ocean environments, there will be opportunities for undergraduate students to partake in this project in order to give them hands-on experience in ongoing research. Results from this research will be communicated to the general public using the online portal of the Sant Ocean Hall of the National Natural History Museum, as well as the project homepage of the Assembling the Cnidarian Tree of Life project. Furthermore, strategies and computer code created for this project will be made available to other researchers through the internet and specimens collected will be deposited at major public museums.