Meeting Abstract

130.8  Tuesday, Jan. 7 15:15  Reconciling morphology, molecules, and species diversity with phoronid phylogenetic relationships. SANTAGATA, S.; Long Island University-Post scott.santagata@gmail.com

Phoronids are tubiculous marine invertebrates closely related to brachiopods. Previous phylogenetic work by Santagata and Cohen (2009) found only weak congruence between the morphological and molecular based analyses. Here, I present an improved molecular phylogenetic analysis based on six genes and additional phoronid specimens that shows better concordance with adult morphology and reproductive traits. Combined with molecular sequences gathered from phoronid larval types, this dataset also sheds new light on phoronid species diversity as well as taxonomic status of some debated species. This ongoing work aims to better assess the validity of larval and adult morphological characters in phoronid systematics, identify several unclassified larval types, and detect cryptic species within adult phoronid morphotypes having seemingly cosmopolitan distributions.