Wealth Of New Species Discovered From The Abyssal Plains Of The Atlantic Ocean

The early results from the project Latitudinal Gradients in the Deep Sea of the Atlantic Ocean: DIVA were presented at a workshop at the University of Oldenburg, Germany, on September 18, 2001. The results were the first reports from a team of 39 taxonomists from Germany, Russia, Spain and the USA who have been collaborating to collect and describe fauna from an expedition in June 2000 to survey deep-sea organisms along a 700km transect, at a depth of 5000m, in the Angola Basin.

One of the project leaders, Dr. Wolfgang Wägele of Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany, said the preliminary findings presented in September’s workshop reveal a large number of new species from this remote and inaccessible habitat.

For example, of 38 Cumacea (small crustaceans, 1 – 10 mm in size) 22 are new species, and up to 90% of the copepods (an extremely diverse group of small crustaceans) are new. A number of new Loricifera species have also been identified. These are very small invertebrates which, although are now known to be speciose, were for a long-time overlooked with the phylum described only in 1983.

In addition to yielding new species and confirming the diversity of deep sea life, the material collected is helping clarify aspects of the life cycles of these organisms and will provide new information on the species’ distributions.

At first sight, the abyssal plains look relatively uniform, but DIVA’s closer examination is revealing large differences in the structure of the sediments and the composition of the fauna. “We are finding that different groups dominate at different sites and that several species are very rare, with only one specimen collected during the entire expedition,” said Wägele. The rare species are, for example, from the genera Acanthaspidia, Mesosignum, Munna, Storthyngura (small crustaceans related to woodlice).

The factors influencing these differences will only be identified when all relevant data are available. Dr. Wägele estimates that this will take approximately two years, and maybe longer for the more speciose groups. A meeting of all participants is being planned for 2002, to summarize the preliminary observations.

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More Information on DIVA see http://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/spezzoo/diva1.html and http://www.nrel.colostate.edu/IBOY/whatandwhere.html#DIVA