Marine zooplankton populations have the potential to respond to and reflect event-scale as well as seasonal changes in marine environmental... » More

Marine zooplankton populations have the potential to respond to and reflect event-scale as well as seasonal changes in marine environmental conditions. Thus these extremely diverse organisms represent excellent "model organisms" for monitoring aquatic ecosystems. In order to understand shifts in the North Sea zooplankton community, valid species identification is indispensable. However, until now, the study of zooplankton is a demanding and time-consuming work and the traditional way of species identification based on morphological characters often requires excellent taxonomic expertise. The use of DNA barcodes provides an additive approach in exploring species richness and can speed up routine analysis of zooplankton samples. Our study of zooplankton diversity is being conducted in a recently started project on the coverage of the North Sea metazoan fauna at a molecular level. Numerous specimens of a variety of taxa have been collected in different regions of the North Sea and determined to species level by means of morphological traits. For molecular analysis, a fragment of the mitochondrial COI has been applied as the standard DNA barcode as well as alternative nuclear markers. We will present preliminary results on the molecular diversity of zooplankton from different areas of the North Sea.

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