Exploring population connectivity in the deep sea

A team of researchers from the OIMB collaborated with members of Eggleston and He labs at North Carolina State University and the Van Dover and Cunningham labs at Duke University in an NSF-funded deep sea research project.  The OIMB team was responsible for collecting and identifying all marine invertebrate larvae, which were collected from a variety of depths from the sea surface to over 3,000 meters deep using a modified plankton collecting apparatus called a MOCNESS.  The focus of this project was to increase our understanding of the connectivity of seep populations in the deep sea, which may be facilitated by larval dispersal. 

Chemosynthetic vent and seep species in the deep sea have patchy distribution separated by vast distances, and the role of larval dispersal in connecting these populations in not well understood.  While there is evidence for effective larval dispersal between distant vent communities, less is known about connectivity in seep communities.  Deep currents are relatively slow, and larval transport is more likely to occur in shallow depths.  Thus, the position of larvae in the water column coupled with their pelagic duration, determines their dispersal potential.  Yet information on larval distribution of seep species in the water column remains generally scarce.  

Larvae were collected on four separate cruises from 2011–2015 in the Barbados Accretionary Prism, the South Atlantic Bight, and the Gulf of Mexico (see map).  All larvae were sorted, photographed, preserved and later identified with DNA sequence data using barcoding gene regions (16S, COI, 18S, as described in the Methods section) aboard the RV Oceanus, Atlantis and Endeavor.  We collected over 7,000 larvae from 20 phyla.  Click on the categories below to learn more about the larvae we collected and identified from various depths.