RAPID: Diversity and symbiotic relationships of annelids in a poorly known region of the deep Pacific

虽然海洋占地球表面的70%以上，但由于采样的困难和昂贵性，深海的多样性仍然大大不足。根据对深海海底的有限采样，研究人员发现，这些环境中的生物多样性取决于温度、盐度、地貌和深度等因素。缺乏数据的一个领域是有时深度超过7 000米的海沟。鉴于海沟的极端环境，它们可能拥有独特的物种，但这些地区的生物多样性几乎完全未知。环节动物，或称分节蠕虫，是包括深海生境在内的海洋环境中生物群落的多样性和主要代表。然而，有限的深海采样限制了我们从这些广泛的环境中描述环节动物生物多样性的能力。除了对深海环节动物蠕虫的生物多样性进行探索、描述和编目外，该项目还将开展两项新的外联活动。与威尔明顿的北卡罗来纳州大学的MarineQuest项目合作，将为K-12学生开发两项新的外联活动，以说明研究船上的生活以及研究人员如何研究生物体对深海生活的适应。该项目将在森肯贝格研究所和自然历史博物馆的Angelika Brandt博士的领导下，在德国R/V索内号上收集东北太平洋东阿留申海沟的超深海地点和白令海附近大陆架的深海深处的环节动物。样品将保存在福尔马林和RNAlater中，分别用于形态学和分子学研究。我们的目标是记录和描述环节动物的多样性和共生体从这些偏远和极端的环境中使用形态和分子测序技术。传统的分类学，荧光原位杂交（FISH），和组学技术将被用来表征环节动物多样性在这个相对未研究的地区的深，该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的智力价值进行评估来支持和更广泛的影响审查标准。

While the oceans occupy more than 70% of the Earth’s surface, the diversity of the deep-sea is still vastly understudied due to the difficult and expensive nature of sampling. Based on the limited sampling of the deep seafloor, researchers have found that biodiversity in these environments is dependent upon factors, such as temperature, salinity, geomorphology, and depth. One area lacking data is oceanic trenches which sometimes reach depths over 7,000m. Given the environmental extremes of oceanic trenches, they may harbor unique sets of species but biodiversity from these regions is almost completely unknown. Annelids, or segmented worms, are a diverse and dominant representative of communities in marine environments, including deep-sea habitats. However, limited sampling from the deep sea has restricted our ability to characterize annelid biodiversity from these widespread environments. In addition to exploring, describing and cataloging the biodiversity of annelid worms from the deep sea, this project will result in two new outreach activities. In collaboration with the MarineQuest program at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, two new outreach activities for K-12 students will be developed to illustrate life aboard a research vessel and how researchers study adaptations of organisms to life in the deep sea. This project will collect annelids from hadal sites of the Eastern Aleutian Trench in the Northeast Pacific Ocean and abyssal depths of the nearby continental shelf in the Bering Sea aboard the German R/V Sonne under the leadership of Dr. Angelika Brandt of The Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum. The samples will be preserved in formalin and RNAlater for morphological and molecular work, respectively. The goal is to document and describe annelid diversity and their symbionts from these remote and extreme environments using morphological and molecular sequencing techniques. Traditional taxonomy, fluorescence in-situ hybridization (FISH), and -omics techniques will be used to characterize annelid diversity in this relatively unstudied region of the deep-sea and determine if there is a greater abundance of symbiotic taxa in annelid microbiomes at hadal depths compared to abyssal depths.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.