Continued Inventory of Phylum Tardigrada
Continued Inventory of Phylum Tardigrada
We propose to continue our inventory of water bears (Phylum Tardigrada). To date (Jan '05) we have identified just over 4500 specimens, discovering 62 new records for the park (out of a total of 65 species), including 12 species new to science. Most of our backlogged, original samples have now been processed and are mounted on slides for identification, but we are adding to our collection to focus on special habitats of interest such as lichens and mosses on rocks. In addition to continuing the basic inventory, we will continue work on: describing our new species in separate publications, developing the on-line taxonomic key to tardigrades which is well underway, and continuing to add to our photo-catalogue of our species and mapping of species distributions in the park. Additionally, the Tenth International Symposium on Tardigrades will be meeting the summer of 2006. A paper summarizing our results to date will be presented at that conference and submitted for publication!
Our current species list now stands at 69 species, 66 new records, and 13 new to science. In my presentation at the annual ATBI meeting in December, I reported that species richness estimates based on 7000 specimens, indicated that 96 species may occur in the park. (I also evaluated the efficacy of the various species richness estimates by comparing their predictions based on half our data to the numbers present in the total database.)<?xml:namespace prefix = o />
To put this into perspective, 96 species represents 10% of the world’s known tardigrades, whereas the park is home to only 6% of the world’s salamanders. We have also compared our species list to the other two large-scale tardigrade inventories, one in Italy and one in Poland, and our diversity is higher than either of these European studies.
