Evolutionary ecology of hydrothermal vent barnacles: Toward an understanding of the mechanisms underlying the biodiversity of deep-sea hydrothermal vent communities

Abstract

Since the discovery of deep-sea hydrothermal vent communities in 1977, researchers have made efforts to understand the mechanisms underlying the biodiversity of these communities. “Biodiversity” is hierarchical in nature, ranging from genetic to ecosystem levels and local to regional scales, and encompassing genetic, species, ecosystem, and landscape diversity. A previous paper suggested that interactions between local and regional ecological processes in hydrothermal vent ecosystems could be understood through a metacommunity framework. As a first step toward understanding the complex interactions in these ecosystems, summarizing evolutionary-ecology studies conducted at different hierarchical levels for each vent taxon could be useful. Barnacles are suitable model species for studying evolutionary ecology at various spatiotemporal scales because of the good availability of fossil records, and because of their wide distribution and high potential for laboratory/field-based experiments using both larvae and adults. In this paper, studies on hydrothermal vent barnacles at each hierarchical level of biodiversity are reviewed.