Meeting Abstract
While commonly found in the plankton, our current understanding of spionid biodiversity in Antarctica is limited by the difficulties of sampling the region and a lack of taxonomic expertise in the identification of spionid species, particularly for larval life history stages. With difficulties utilizing morphological characters to determine species diversity within the Spionidae, we chose to use DNA barcoding as a tool for taxonomic identification. Samples from throughout the Western Antarctic, including the Peninsula, Bellingshausen, Amundsen, and Ross Seas were collected, DNA was extracted, and standard genetic barcoding methods were applied. A fragment of the mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COI) was used as our barcode marker to connect our knowledge of larval populations to adults collected from throughout the region. Additionally, the genetic barcodes generated in this study will also help determine if any of the collected organisms are cryptic species of spionids or potentially previously unrecorded species from the regions sampled. Future directions will include expanded sampling for both adults and larvae from other regions of the Southern Ocean and also to potentially utilize genetic and morphological characters to describe new species of spionids from the region.
