DNA barcoding the phyllosoma of Scyllarides squammosus: New paper out!

by Ferran Palero

A new paper from the ChallenGen team entitled “DNA barcoding the phyllosoma of Scyllarides squammosus (H. Milne Edwards, 1837) (Decapoda: Achelata: Scyllaridae)” has been recently published in the JCR journal Zootaxa.

As shown by their fierce-looking mouthparts, phyllosoma larvae rank high on the planktonic food-chain as specialized predators. Luckily for us, they generally do not grow above a few centimeters in total length!

Despite being the slipper lobster genera with the largest number of species with commercial importance, little is known of the unique long-lived planktonic phyllosoma stages of Scyllarides. Recently, a large and diverse collection of Scyllaridae phyllosoma from the Coral Sea was analysed by members of our team. DNA-barcoding and phylogenetic analyses allowed Ferran Palero and colleagues to identify several S. squammosus phyllosoma larvae, including stages that were previously undescribed or poorly known. From a combination of adult and larval morphology with molecular data, we could reveal inconsistencies with regard to the affinities among species assigned to Scyllarides. This new evidence will contribute to future studies addressing the phylogenetic relationships within the genus.

Furthermore, this new paper represents the first contribution of Rebeca Genis-Armero, a MSc. student recently graduated from the University of Valencia and a name to keep in mind for the future of scientific drawing and phyllosoma larvae.

ChallenGen at the SIEBM 2016 in Porto

by Marta Campos

From the 5th to 9th September, several ChallenGen members attended the XIX Iberian Symposium on Marine Biology Studies (SIEBM) in Porto, Portugal, which this year was hosted by the Interdisciplinary Centre of Marine and Environmental Research (CIIMAR). Throughout the week, scientific posters and oral communications were presented and we could learn about biodiversity, conservation, ecology, invasive species and oceanography. Moreover, eight invited speakers, from different parts of Europe, explained current research on hot topics and forecasted future directions in marine biology research. One of these speakers was Xavier Turon, who presented a talk about the use of genetic tools in marine biology in the Iberian context. His talk included some of the newest results attained in the ChallenGen Project.

Aside from this plenary lecture, 8 oral communications and 3 posters were presented with ChallenGen results, so the project had a very relevant presence in this meeting.

We also participated in several social events and cultural activities. In addition, we could enjoy the opportunity to know the wonderful city of Porto and its famous wine. We also had plenty of opportunities to eat codfish, which is cooked in apparently endless ways!

We hope to meet again in the next SIEBM which will take place in two years in Algarve!

The eight members of the ChallenGen Project who attended the SIEBM 2016, at the new CIIMAR building.

ChallenGen Project and CEAB at the XIV Firamar

by Maria Casso

Last weekend, the 20th-21st July, the Centre for Advanced Studies of Blanes (CEAB - CSIC) participated at the XIV Firamar of Sant Pol de Mar. The Firamar is a fair of artisans and activities related to the sea, like many research projects developed at the CEAB. Our ChallenGen Project, which is developed partially at the CEAB, got involved in the event.

As a member of the ChallenGen Project and the CEAB, I stayed in our stand at the fair during Saturday afternoon, explaining the work researchers conduct at the CEAB about invasive species, climate change, conservation, ecology and biodiversity. It was really nice to see how interested are many people on our job!

The stand of the CEAB at the Firamar, with some visitors during Saturday afternoon. Children could paint their own real balloon fish!

ChallenGen project and UB at the III Posidonia Summer Festival in Colera

by Carles Carreras

The conference about how molecular tools can be used to study our marine neighbours.

The last 9th of August we participated at the III Posidonia Summer Festival in the beautiful town of Colera. This annual event, organised by the town council and the Som-hi Association, aims to approach people to the sea by organising a large variety of talks and activities, like scientific snorkel, marine biodiversity family workshops or a marine renewable energies conference.

In this context we had the opportunity to explain the ChallenGen Project to local villagers and tourists by describing them several examples of how molecular tools can be used to study our marine neighbours. The talk took place at the Colera Trull, an ancient olive oil cellar, and people from all ages had the opportunity to became scientists for an hour by investigating with genetic markers the life of some of the animals of the Mediterranean sea. We thus discovered how littoral fishes structure their populations and adapt to local environment conditions, or how marine turtles migrate and reproduce, among others interesting examples. The talk was followed by an intense debate were we could answer everybody’s questions including the importance to study and conserve our marine biodiversity.

The methods developed for metabarcoding of hard bottom communities explained in an international book chapter

by Xavier Turon

Owen Wangensteen and Xavier Turon have been invited to write a chapter in the book "Marine Animal Forests. The Ecology of Benthic Biodiversity Hotspots", of the Springer International Publishing Company (ISBN: 978-3-319-17001-5), which is edited by Sergio Rossi, Lorenzo Bramanti, Andrea Gori and Covadonga Orejas. In this chapter, entitled "Metabarcoding techniques for assessing biodiversity of marine animal forests", Owen and Xavier explain the methods developed for analysing hard bottom communities using metabarcoding. We believe that it is crucial to setup standardized protocols, and that this book can be an excellent platform to share and disseminate our experience with the different steps of the metabarcoding process.

This chapter is now accepted for publication, and we foresee that it will be published in the forthcoming months.

Techniques developed in METABARPARK, such as the size fractionation of the samples, can be adopted by other teams working on metabarcoding of marine benthos.

The ChallenGen group has a new doctor!

by Alex Garcia-Cisneros

After a longer period than seems, at least to me, I defended my thesis the last 28th of June. Some members of the ChallenGen project joined the festive day together. The thesis analysed the biology, genetic structure and phylogeography of two starfish species, Coscinasterias tenuispina and Echinaster sepositus.

During these years of thesis work, we found a low genetic diversity in both asteroid species, lower than other echinoderms with the same distribution range. However, the reasons differ depending on the species. Low diversity in E. sepositus can be explained by a recent demographic expansion from few individuals with few alleles, while in C. tenuispina by the presence of asexual reproduction processes along all its distribution range, even with totally monoclonal populations. Furthermore, our results demonstrate that fissiparity in C. tenuispina increases with environmental instability. However, well-fed individuals do not lose their potential for sexual reproduction (development of gonads, only males). Finally, a last chapter in C. tenuispina presents at least one mechanism to avoid or postpone senescence and ensure persistence of clonal populations: telomere elongation.

Although there were nerves, or more precisely, I was extremely nervous, it was a really good festive day.

Me, with my son, receiving the PhD certificate from Marta Pascual, the principal investigator at the UB of the Challengen project, who was a member of the thesis tribunal.

New paper published: Spatio-temporal patterns of genetic diversity of Styela plicata in harbour populations

by Xavier Turon

We add another paper to the Styela plicata history: “Stochasticity in space, persistence in time: genetic heterogeneity in harbour populations of the introduced ascidian Styela plicata”, by Mari-Carmen Pineda, Beatriz Lorente, Susanna López-Legentil, Creu Palacín and Xavier Turon, which has been published today (23rd June) in PeerJ.

In this study, we analysed genetic structure of the populations of Styela plicata in 9 harbours along the Iberian Mediterranean coast and adjacent Atlantic waters (>1,200 km range) at two time points 5 years apart (2009 and 2014). Using COI sequence data of ca. 400 specimens, we found strong spatial genetic structure, with significant differences among many populations, but no significant differences among years. Our results revealed spatial genetic heterogeneity and temporal homogeneity in S. plicata, suggesting a limited role of recurrent, vessel-mediated transport of organisms among small to medium-size harbours. Our study area is representative of many highly urbanized coasts with dense harbour networks. In these environments, the episodic chance arrival of colonisers appears to determine the genetic structure of populations and the genetic composition of these early colonising individuals persists in the respective harbours, at least over moderate time frames (five years) that encompass ca. 20 generations of S. plicata.

This article is yet another instance of the importance of the temporal component in studies of introduced species to unravel processes occurring during secondary dispersal of non-indigenous species.

Map of the Iberian Peninsula (NW Mediterranean) showing the sampling sites of Styela plicata. Pie charts represent haplotype frequencies for the COI gene in each population analysed in 2009 and 2014.

Another ChallenGen meeting

by Marta Campos

On the 20th June, the members of ChallenGen Project held a general meeting at the Biology Department of the University of Barcelona.

It was our pleasure to learn about ongoing work of the MarSymbiomics project, with which several collaborative papers have been prepared.

This encounter gave us the opportunity to interact with each other, and to present the latest news and updates on howour research and work is going on . During the last trimester, for example, Maria was in Venezia doing a research stay, Alex and Carles worked with informatics analysis and Clara and Marc prepared two oral communications for the XVI day of evolutionary biology, organizated by the Institute of Catalan Studies. We also learnt about the last results published or submitted within the framework of ChallenGen.

Moreover, the CEAB-CSIC researcher Iosune Uriz was our invited speaker and explained us the main results until now of her project MarSymbiomics.

It was a great week start!

Measuring settlement rates of sea urchins. New paper out!

by Owen Wangensteen

Team members of the ChallenGen Project at the University of Barcelona, in collaboration with scientists from the University of La Laguna (Canary Islands) have just published a new paper on Scientia Marina journal, describing and testing new designs of artificial collectors for quantitative assessment of settlement rates in sea urchins.

The study of population dynamics of sea urchins is crucial for understanding the ecology of Mediterranean and temperate Atlantic rocky shores, since these echinoderms are often the main herbivore species in shallow benthic ecosystems and they are responsible of linking the primary production from seaweeds to other higher levels of the trophic chains. Many sea urchin populations may be limited by the settlement rates (the process by which the planktonic sea urchin larvae settle and become juvenile sea urchins). Methods for measuring these settlement rates were not standardized and yielded non-comparable results. The work presented in this paper, carried out in parallel at Canary Islands and Costa Brava (Spain) shows that three-dimensional collectors made from “bioballs” (a biofilm-friendly, high surface material often used as filters in aquaria) are the most suitable device for this assessment, allowing for an accurate and repeatable measurement of this elusive, yet important, ecological process.

The best part is that these bioballs collectors are useful not only for sea urchins settlers. They could be suitable for assessing settlement and colonization rates for a wide-range of marine invertebrates and can help marine biologists to get a more accurate view of the population dynamics of many species present in benthic ecosystems.

The three types of collector tested in this work: plastic biofilter ball (A, C), vertical brush (B, D) and horizontal triangular mat of coconut fibre (B, E).

Monitoring ascidians in the Venetian Lagoon

by Maria Casso

A wood pile dolphin, full of benthic organisms, and half eaten by wood-boring species.

Marco and the fog during the sampling.

The Benthic Ecology research group from the Istituto di Scienze Marina, ISMAR (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, CNR), placed in the Venetian Lagoon, is hosting me for a 3 months research stay. They focuses on ecology of coastal transitional ecosystems, specially benthic communities. More recently, they are interested on wood-boring marine organisms (shipworms and gribbles). This is very important in a place like the Venetian Lagoon as it has a large wooden maritime cultural heritage.

The aim of my stay in Venice is to study the invasive ascidians, which grow on top of those wooden marine structures. To do this, yesterday we went to a field trip around the Venetian Lagoon with Davide Tagliapietra, Marco Sigovini and Irene Guarneri. It was foggy in the beginning but more sunny at the end of the sampling. The objective of the field trip was to determine the distribution of some invasive ascidians and to collect samples for aquaria experiments.