Biodiversity and biogeography of zooxanthellate soft corals across the Indo-Pacific

作者：Catherine S. McFadden, Katie Erickson, Audra Lane, Bibiana Américo Fernando Nassongole, Steven Aguilar, Sabra K Dunakey, Kathleen M Durkin, Jue Alef A. Lalas, Yuka Kushida, Laura Macrina, Natalie P Minor, Mildred Morales-Paredes, Josephine Nelson, Asha Peddada, Sophie Poole, Rafael Porto, Risa Purow-Ruderman, Karen E. Snyder, Theo Wismar, Kaveh Samimi‐Namin, Maria Vanessa Baria‐Rodriguez, Francesca Benzoni, Danwei Huang, James Davis Reimer, Gustav Paulay, Andrea M. Quattrini, Merrick Ekins, Yehuda Benayahu · 发表于：Scientific Reports · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1038/s41598-025-98790-7 · 被引用次数：15 · 研究领域：Coral and Marine Ecosystems Studies、Marine and fisheries research、Marine and coastal plant biology

Documentation of biodiversity and its geographical distribution is necessary to understand the processes and drivers of evolutionary diversification as well as to guide conservation and management initiatives. Among the most emblematic patterns of biodiversity in the world's oceans is the Coral Triangle (Indo-Australian Archipelago), widely recognized to be the center of species richness for a variety of marine life forms. The distribution of biodiversity remains incompletely documented, however, for a majority of reef-associated invertebrate taxa, including the zooxanthellate soft corals (Octocorallia) that dominate hard substrate on many Indo-Pacific reefs. We used a genetic approach to document the diversity of Indo-Pacific soft corals, sequencing two single-locus barcoding markers for > 4400 soft coral specimens and assigning individuals to molecular operational taxonomic units as proxies of species. We document two centers of species richness for zooxanthellate soft corals, one in the Indo-Australian Archipelago and a second, equally diverse center in the Western Indian Ocean. Centers of endemicity for soft corals are coincident with these centers of species richness, although the peripheral Red Sea and Hawaii also support high proportions of endemic taxa. The patterns documented here suggest that biogeographic distributions of soft coral families may be driven in part by larval dispersal potential: taxa with benthic larvae are absent from most oceanic islands of the cen...