Data from: Bacterial epibiont communities of panmictic Antarctic krill are spatially structured ...

Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba) are amongst the most abundant animals on Earth, with a circumpolar distribution in the Southern Ocean. Genetic and genomic studies have failed to detect any population structure for the species, suggesting a single panmictic population. However, the hyper-abundanc...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Clarke, Laurence, Suter, Leonie, King, Rob, Bissett, Andrew, Bestley, Sophie, Deagle, Bruce
Format: Dataset
Language:English
Published: Dryad 2021
Subjects:
Online Access:https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.4mw6m908k
https://datadryad.org/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.4mw6m908k
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Summary:Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba) are amongst the most abundant animals on Earth, with a circumpolar distribution in the Southern Ocean. Genetic and genomic studies have failed to detect any population structure for the species, suggesting a single panmictic population. However, the hyper-abundance of krill slows the rate of genetic differentiation, masking potential underlying structure. Here we use high-throughput sequencing of bacterial 16S rRNA genes to show that krill bacterial epibiont communities exhibit spatial structuring, driven mainly by distance rather than environmental factors, especially for strongly krill-associated bacteria. Estimating the ecological processes driving bacterial community turnover indicated this was driven by bacterial dispersal limitation increasing with geographic distance. Furthermore, divergent epibiont communities generated from a single krill swarm split between aquarium tanks under near identical conditions suggests physical isolation in itself can cause ... : High-throughput DNA sequencing of bacterial 16S rRNA genes. See paper for more details. ...