New Record of Hydrothermal Vent Squat Lobster (Munidopsis lauensis) Provides Evidence of a Dispersal Corridor between the Pacific and Indian Oceans

Abstract

Hydrothermal vents are chemosynthetically driven ecosystems and one of the most extreme environments on Earth. Vent communities exhibit remarkable taxonomic novelty at the species and supra-species levels, and over 80% of vent species are endemic. Here, we used mitochondrial DNA to identify the biogeographic distribution of Munidopsis lauensis and the heme-binding regions of A1-type COX1 from six species (including M. lauensis) to investigate whether genetic variation in the protein structure affects oxygen-binding ability. We verified the identity of Indian Ocean specimens by comparing sequences from the barcoding gene mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase subunit 1 (COI) with known M. lauensis sequences from the NCBI database. The data show that these are the first recorded specimens of M. lauensis in the Indian Ocean; previously, this species had been reported only in the southwest Pacific. Our findings support the hypothesis that vent fauna in the Pacific and Indian Oceans can interact via active ridges. In the case of the mitochondrial DNA-binding site, the arrangement of heme-binding ligands and type A1 motif of M. lauensis was identical to that in other species. Moreover, our findings suggest that the mechanism of oxygen binding is well conserved among species from terrestrial organisms to hydrothermal extremophiles. Overall, dispersal of the same species to geologically separated hydrothermal vents and conserved heme-binding regions in mitochondrial proteins suggest that hydrothermal species might have evolved from shallow sea organisms and became distributed geographically using a dispersion corridor.

Active hydrothermal vent ecosystems in the Indian Ocean are in need of protection

“…Moreover, Munidopsis lauensis, Smacigastes pumila, Alvinocaris markensis, Paralepetopsis ferrugivora, Lepetodirilus sp. C, Nereis sp., and Branchipolynoe seepensis were absent at other Indian vent fields Hwang et al, 2022). Three other taxa were known only from one other Indian vent field, Archinome sp.…”