Zooplankton biogeographic boundaries in the California Current System as determined from metabarcoding.

Kathleen J Pitz,Francisco P Chavez,Robert C Vrijenhoek,Shannon B Johnson,Tracy L Campbell,Jonathan Geller,Haibin Zhang,Jinchen Guo,David G Jenkins

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0235159

Kathleen J Pitz, Francisco P Chavez + Show 7 more

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0235159

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Abstract

Within the southern California Current ecosystem there are two well-documented breaks in marine community structure at Point Conception and Punta Eugenia. We explored the presence of similar breaks in a diverse zooplankton community through metabarcoding of mixed net tow tissue samples collected during an expedition from Monterey to Baja California in February of 2012. We recovered a high diversity of species as well as patterns of species presence that align with their previously documented ranges in this region. We found a clear break at Punta Eugenia in overall zooplankton community structure, while Point Conception was weakly linked to changes in community structure. We analyzed this dataset through two parallel bioinformatic pipelines to examine the robustness of these results. Our overall conclusions were consistent across both pipelines, however there were differences in species detection. This study illustrates the utility of metabarcoding analysis on mixed tissue samples for recovering known patterns of diversity, as well as allowing elucidation of broad patterns of community differentiation across many groups of organisms.

Highlights

Ecologists have long been fascinated with biogeographic boundaries that separate regions of strikingly different biological communities
North and south of Point Conception, from stations UC1 to UC9, conditions reflected the low temperature, low salinity subarctic waters that form the California Current
South of Punta Eugenia, from stations UC10 to CP23, we saw a transition to a greater influence of high salinity Gulf of California water, subtropical surface water and high temperature tropical surface water (Fig 1)[10,18]

Summary

Introduction

Ecologists have long been fascinated with biogeographic boundaries that separate regions of strikingly different biological communities. Along the southwestern coast of North America there are two well described biogeographic boundaries in marine community structure: the first at Point Conception in southern California and the second at Punta Eugenia in Baja California. These headlands separate different physical oceanographic regimes and are the location of many species range endpoints as well as documented barriers to gene flow [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Studies that incorporate information from multiple sources show these breaks can have varying influence on different taxa [7] and may represent

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