Anchialine biodiversity in the Turks and Caicos islands: new discoveries and current faunal composition

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

Documents

  • Brett C. Gonzalez
  • Alejandro Martínez
  • Olesen, Jørgen
  • Sarit B. Truskey
  • Lauren Ballou
  • Marc Allentoft-Larsen
  • Joost Daniels
  • Paul Heinerth
  • Mark Parrish
  • Naqqi Manco
  • Jon Ward
  • Thomas M. Iliffe
  • Karen J. Osborn
  • Worsaae, Katrine

Lying at the southernmost point ofthe Lucayan Archipelago, the Turks and Caicos Islands are amongst the better studied localities for anchialine cave biodiversity. For nearly five decades, novel invertebrate fauna, comprised primarily of crustaceans, have been collected from these tidally influenced pools – but new findings are always on the horizon. Herein we present new records of crustaceans and annelids from anchialine blue holes and horizontal caves of the Turks and Caicos. These findings include two potentially new species of meiofaunal annelids and a new species of remipede collected from a shallow water cave pool. Our 2019 expedition additionally expands known faunal distributions for several taxa across the Caicos islands, and raises the biodiversity of the region to 35 species, 13 of them considered endemic. This is the first comprehensive faunal list for the anchialine systems in the Caicos Bank.

Original languageEnglish
JournalInternational Journal of Speleology
Volume49
Issue number2
Pages (from-to)71-86
Number of pages16
ISSN0392-6672
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2020

    Research areas

  • Anchialine, Nerillidae, Polynoidae, Remipedia, Subterranean fauna

Number of downloads are based on statistics from Google Scholar and www.ku.dk


No data available

ID: 243152381