Meeting Abstract
Most marine biodiversity remains undescribed. DNA barcoding is an important tool for the assessment of biodiversity and the identification of species in taxa with few easily assessed and preservable morphological characters and many cryptic lineages, like ribbon worms (Nemertea). Nemerteans play important ecological roles as top predators, and some have economic significance as egg predators of commercially harvested crustaceans or biomedical potential as toxin producers. The objective of this study was to assess nemertean species diversity in a previously unsampled part of the Caribbean coast of Panama by DNA-barcoding of the mitochondrial gene cytochrome c oxidase subunit 1 (CO1). This contributes to the larger goal of assessing nemertean diversity in the Caribbean Sea. Using universal and nemertean-specific primers, we were able to obtain good quality sequences from 92/97 (94.8%) specimens collected from Colón, Panama during six collecting trips in 2018. Sequences were sorted into operational taxonomic units (OTUs) using a 4% p-distance cut off. Six sequences belonged to other phyla of marine invertebrates (Arthropoda, Annelida) and likely represent contamination from gut contents. The 86 nemertean sequences represented 37 OTUs (putative species), and 13 of those belong to previously unsequenced (i.e. likely newly discovered) species bringing the total number of nemertean species in the Caribbean Sea to 191. This is in stark contrast with the 36 described nemertean species currently reported from the Caribbean. The large proportion of new species (35.1%) discovered at the new site suggests that the nemerteans of the Caribbean remain undersampled.
