Hydrothermal vents are critical to marine geochemical cycling and ecosystem functioning. Although hydrothermal vent-associated megafauna chemoautotrophic prokaryotes have received extensive dedicated study, smaller eukaryotes such as meiofauna nanobiota much less attention. These communities comprise links in trophic flow carbon of other habitats, so study their occurrence role vent ecosystems ...

Deep-sea floors represent one of the largest and most complex ecosystems on Earth but remain essentially unexplored. The vastness and remoteness of this ecosystem make deep-sea sampling difficult, hampering traditional taxonomic observations and diversity assessment. This problem is particularly true in the case of the deep-sea meiofauna, which largely comprises small-sized, fragile, and diffic...

Extreme physical conditions usually limit the meiofauna occurrence and distribution in highly hydrodynamic environments such as reflective beaches. Despite sediment grains of the upper layers being constantly resuspended and deposited, the high energy of the swash zone besides depositing coarse sediments allows an ample vertical distribution of meiofaunal organisms. The effect of physical, chem...

Indicators of ecosystem structures and processes are important in estuarine health studies but are rarely assessed simultaneously. Organic enrichment affects the abundance and diversity of meioand macrofauna, but its impact on foodweb dynamics is less well known.We used amanipulative field experiment combining stable isotope enrichment with compartmental modelling (WinSAAM) and ecological netwo...

Molecular tools have revolutionized the exploration of biodiversity, especially in organisms for which traditional taxonomy is difficult, such as for microscopic animals (meiofauna). Environmental (eDNA) metabarcode surveys of DNA extracted from sediment samples are increasingly popular for surveying biodiversity. Most eDNA surveys use the nuclear gene-encoding small-subunit rDNA gene (18S) as ...

The western Antarctic Peninsula is experiencing strong environmental changes as a consequence of ongoing regional warming. Glaciers in the area are retreating rapidly and increased sediment-laden meltwater runoff threatens the benthic biodiversity at shallow depths. We identified three sites with a distinct glacier-retreat related history and different levels of glacial influence in the inner p...

Nemertodermatida are microscopically small, benthic marine worms. Specimens of two nominal species, Sterreria psammicola and Nemertinoides elongatus from 33 locations worldwide were sequenced for three molecular markers. Species delimitation and validation was done using gene trees, haplotype networks and multilocus Bayesian analysis. We found 20 supported species of which nine: Nemertinoides g...