Award: OCE-1155188

Intellectual Merit: Organic-rich habitat islands support specialized communities throughout natural ecosystems and often play fundamental roles in maintaining alpha and beta diversity, thus facilitating adaptive radiations and evolutionary novelty. Whale-bone and wood falls occur widely in the deep-sea and contribute fundamentally to biodiversity and evolutionary novelty; nonetheless, large-scale patterns of biodiversity, connectivity and ecosystem function in these organic-rich metacommunity systems remain essentially unexplored. Using bottom landers carrying bone and wood, we evaluated bathymetric, regional and inter-basin variations in biodiversity and connectivity, as well as interactions between biodiversity and ecosystem functions at the deep-sea floor. Our experiments in the Northeastern Pacific were complemented by a set of landers in the Southwest Atlantic that were deployed and studied by international collaboration with Brazilian scientists. Our results found that the identity and diversity of dominant bone/wood species varies between depths and ocean basins. Also importantly, genetic (and species) exchange appears to be much greater within a depth zone than between depth zones. This later finding was recovered based on the use of Single Nucleotide Polymorphism data that examines thousands of loci in the nuclear genome. We find that wood-boring bivalves colonizing wood falls, at a given depth, are likely recruited from a single population. We have also been exploring the evolutionary history of these taxa with genetic tools. The data indication that while individual species maybe restricted to a given basin, lineages have been about to move between basins over evolutionary time. Analyses of whole mitochondrial genomes have found that one species of ampharetid annelid worms has more introns (3) than previously reported for any other bilaterian species(to the best of our knowledge). This may hold implications for how deep-sea species deal with transposable elements. Broader Impacts: During the course of this project at least 4 Ph.D. students and Faculty colleague on sabbatical have been trained. Two of these students were women and throughout all phases of the project we have actively encouraged participation of under-represented groups. We developed a new a graduate-level summer course at Friday Harbor Laboratories, titled Deep-Sea Biodiversity, Connectivity and Ecosystem Function, around our bone/wood lander studies. Public outreach included project web sites and cruise blogs, presentations and at UH and Auburn open houses. Though publications and presentations at international meeting, we have shared our results with the scientific community. Also links to the data are available at the BCO-DMO data repository.This work holds important implications for understanding biodiversity and energy utilization in the deep sea. In particular, our results suggest that the deep-sea basins and habitats may be much more interconnected than their shallow water counterparts. Last Modified: 06/12/2017 Submitted by: Kenneth M Halanych