Meeting Abstract
Wood falls occur widely in the deep-sea. They support specialized communities for limited periods of time and contribute fundamentally to biodiversity and contain evolutionary novelties. Wood-boring Xylophagidae are dominant species in deep-sea wood fall communities and play a key role in facilitating wood decomposition. Despite evolutionary and ecological importance of these obligate wood bores, very little is known of their distribution, dispersal potential, and recruitment sources. In this study, we deployed wood landers at two depths (1500 and 3000m), 250 km apart, in the NE Pacific and SW Atlantic basins. To evaluate connectivity and recruitment sources of these wood-boring bivalves, we then genotyped bivalves from 3 landers and a shallow water locality by using a 2b-RAD sequencing approach. We obtained ~ 2,000 filtered SNPs from 140 individuals collected in recovery wood landers after 13 months. Preliminary results suggested that genetic or species exchange was much greater within a depth zone than between different depth zones. Moreover, individuals of the bathyal site (~1500m) were most likely from the same recruitment source in each basin, whereas individuals living in abyssal site (~3000m) potentially came from different gene pools in NE Pacific.
