Exploring the Museum of Natural History collections and unraveling the taxonomy of deep-sea Holothuroidea (Echinodermata): Exploring the past to predict the future.

• Grant number: 24/09503-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Post-doctor
• Start date: September 01, 2024
• End date: August 31, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Physical Sciences and Mathematics - Oceanography
• Principal Investigator: Felipe Antonio de Lima Toledo
• Grantee: Luciana Ribeiro Martins
• Supervisor: Gustav Paulay
• Host Institution: Instituto Oceanográfico (IO). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: University of Florida, Gainesville (UF), United States
• Associated to the scholarship: 21/06442-1 - Conservation paleobiology: Holothuroidea (Echinodermata) as climatic change indicators throughout the Holocene of Campos Basin, South Atlantic, BP.PD

Abstract

The Holothuroidea have worldwide distribution and are common components of benthic fauna since Ordovician. With skeleton composed by calcite, the sea cucumbers can be used as proxies to infer the global climate changes from approaches involving the composition of species, as well as their response to climate changes. However, the first step to make these analyses and them to construct predictive models is a reliably taxonomic study of these fauna.After an initial morphological study, it was only possible to identify a small portion of the samples. Therefore, further progress will be made only when significantly more comparative material of specimens is studied. In this view, the echinoderm collection of the Florida Museum of Natural History (FLMNH), stores the most important deep-sea collection of Holothuroidea, and the access to material from the FLMHN collections (already predicted in the initial project) is critical to the success of the current postdoctoral project, since through the comparative study of species, it will be possible to carry out accurate identification of Brazilian samples. Finally, with the data collection will be created a database of deep-sea holothuroid ossicle assemblage to aid in the identification of species present in sediment samples, which will also be crucial for future palaeoecological studies. The main goals of goals of the research internship are: (1) to study the material of deep-sea holothuroids in order to aid in the identification of Brazilian samples; (2) to perform morphological studies of the deep-sea samples deposited in the FLMNH collections; (3) to create a database of deep-sea holothuroid ossicle assemblage and (4) to diagnose and describe Brazilian species based on the comparative material studied.