Taxonomy, phylogeny, and biodiversity of Lumbrineridae (Annelida, Polychaeta) from the Central Pacific Clarion-Clipperton Zone

By

Neal, Lenka
Abrahams, Emily
Wiklund, Helena
Rabone, Muriel
Bribiesca-Contreras, Guadalupe
Stewart, Eva
Dahlgren, Thomas G. (Thomas Gunnar), 1963-
Glover, Adrian G.

Type

Article

Date of Publication

2023

Original Publication

ZooKeys

Volume

1172

Pages

61--100

Subjects

16S , 18S , CCZ , COI , deep-sea mining , Eunicida , Morphology , Phylogeny , systematics

Contributed by

Pensoft Publishers

Language

English

Published by

Sofia, Bulgaria Pensoft Publishers

Identifiers

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.1172.100483

 

Abstract

The DNA taxonomy of six species of the annelid family Lumbrineridae collected from the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ) in the Central Pacific, an area of potential mining interest for polymetallic nodules, is presented. Lumbrinerids are an ecologically important and understudied annelid family within the deep sea, with many species still undescribed. This study aims to document the taxonomy and biodiversity of the CCZ using specimens collected from the UK-1, OMS, and NORI-D exploration contract areas and Areas of Particular Environmental Interest. Species were identified through a combination of morphological and molecular phylogenetic analysis. We present informal species descriptions associated with voucher specimens, accessible through the Natural History Museum (London) collections, to improve future taxonomic and biodiversity studies of this region. Five taxa in this study had no morphological or genetic matches within the literature and therefore are possibly new to science, but their suboptimal morphological preservation prevented the formalisation of new species. The most abundant taxon Lumbrinerides cf. laubieri (NHM_0020) was compared with the holotype of Lumbrinerides laubieri Miura, 1980 from the deep Northeast Atlantic. Currently no reliable morphological characters separating the Pacific and Atlantic specimens have been found and molecular data from the Atlantic specimens was not available.