Alfa-taxonomy meets a "new" world: 10 years of research on marine

VERÓNICA N. BULNES

Simposio; International symposium of flatworm biology; 2015

Oxford University

Cataloguing and describing the turbellarians to species level may sound old fashioned, especially after the surprising results produced by the recent inflow of molecular data, which have radically affected the phyletic relationships of the Plathyelmithes. Nevertheless, phyletic studies and metagenetic approaches to the ecology of turbellarians (second-generation environmental sequencing) cry out after the help of taxonomists.The Southern Hemisphere has been only partially explored. The magnitude and complexity of the marine biodiversity of this awfully broad area nowadays result in a very weak knowledge of the turbellarian diversity. In this context, an assessment of the Southern biodiversity of microturbellarians still is undefined at a range of spatial and taxonomic scales.Traditionally, marine microturbellarians were considered as lacking dispersal stages, and their descriptions have been mostly devoid of any ecological data. This heavy shortcoming undermines the appreciation of biodiversity patterns.For almost ten years now, an integrated approach study of this group is been carried out along the Atlantic coast of the Buenos Aires province (Argentina), to describe its almost unknown microturbellarian fauna. The concurrent collection of ecological data to be combined with the taxonomic information may lead to elucidate diverse biogeographical matters, and to detect the factors influencing some still poorly explained phenomena, such as range shifts, community changes, and local extinctions.