Meeting Abstract
In aquatic ecosystems, meiofaunal organisms (~40-500 µm in size) are known to influence their local environment through nutrient uptake and cycling and burrowing and feeding behaviors. In addition, dominant meiofaunal organisms, such as copepods and nematodes, are used as food resources for native and invasive fauna. In the Laurentian Great Lakes, meiofauna communities have been linked to invasive round goby populations (as a food resource), and increased meiofaunal abundance has been linked to waste produced by non-native zebra and quagga mussels. Efforts have been made since the 1980s to observe and quantify meiofaunal communities in specific areas of the Great Lakes; however these studies were limited in size of geographic area, number of samples, and the number of lakes sampled. For the current study, meiofaunal samples have been collected across all five of the Laurentian Great Lakes in order to examine community composition and diversity through the use of metabarcoding, which makes use of operational taxonomic units (OTU), which are matched to faunal phyla or classes. This process will provide an overview of community structure and percent contribution of meiofaunal groups to the community by sites, various depths, and whole lakes. Community structure will be tested for differences between lakes, as well as differences in structure over time using historical data. Additionally, differences in community structure between an individual lake’s basins will be evaluated.
