Abstract
AbstractAlthough metabarcoding is a well-established tool for describing diversity of pelagic communities, its quantitative value is still controversial, with poor correlations previously reported between organism abundance/biomass and sequence reads. In this study, we explored an enhanced quantitative approach by metabarcoding whole zooplankton communities using a highly degenerate primer set for the mitochondrial marker cytochrome oxidase I and compared the results to biomass estimates obtained using the traditional morphological approach of processing zooplankton samples. As expected, detected species richness using the metabarcoding approach was 3–4 times higher compared to morphological processing, with the highest differences found in the meroplankton fraction. About 75% of the species identified using microscopy were also recovered in the metabarcoding run. Within the taxa detected using both approaches, the relative numbers of sequence counts showed a strong quantitative relationship to their relative biomass, estimated from length-weight regressions, for a wide range of metazoan taxa. The highest correlations were found for crustaceans and the lowest for meroplanktonic larvae. Our results show that the reported approach of using a metabarcoding marker with improved taxonomic resolution, universal coverage for metazoans, reduced primer bias, and availability of a comprehensive reference database, allow for rapid and relatively inexpensive processing of hundreds of samples at a higher taxonomic resolution than traditional zooplankton sorting. The described approach can therefore be widely applied for monitoring or ecological studies.
Highlights
Mesozooplankton are critical components of the world oceans, providing an essential link from the ocean’s microbial primary and secondary producers to the upper levels of the food web
We examined the relative composition of three common pseudocryptic copepod genera, Calanus spp., Pseudocalanus spp., and Microcalanus spp. (Figures 7 and 8) in the metabarcoding data
We found Pseudocalanus to consist of four species: the Arctic Pseudocalanus acuspes and Pseudocalanus minutus, and boreal Pseudocalanus moultoni and Pseudocalanus elongatus (Figure 8a)
Summary
Mesozooplankton are critical components of the world oceans, providing an essential link from the ocean’s microbial primary and secondary producers to the upper levels of the food web. It can be used to assess the general state of the ecosystem, such as introduction of alien species (Couton et al, 2019; Sepulveda et al, 2020) or changes in the community due to anthropological forcing (Andújar et al, 2018). The need for such surveys globally is growing, as marine systems are placed under increasing strain through development of shipping and industry, pollution, overfishing, and
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