Recently, Frontiers in Marine Science (JCR Area 1) published online the latest results of the Laboratory of Marine Taxonomy and Phylogenetic Evolution of the Institute of Oceanography, Chinese Academy of Sciences, "Morphology and molecular phylogenetic analysis of deep-sea purple gorgonians (Octocorallia: Victorgorgiidae) from seamounts in the tropical Western Pacific, with description of three new species”。
Using a combination of classical taxonomy and molecular systematics methods, the study systematically studied the purple hydrangea family collected from four seamounts in the Mariana Trench and Caroline Ridge cross-linked areas in the western Pacific Ocean, and found and described three new species: Victorgorgia iocasica Li, Zhan & Xu, 2020, Clustered Purple Gorgia victorgorgia fasciculata Li, Zhan & Xu, 2020 and fan-shaped purple hydrangea Victorgorgia flabellata Li, Zhan & Xu, 2020.
Previously, in order to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the establishment of the Institute of Oceanography of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the taxonomists of the Institute of Oceanography named five new species in the deep sea after the Institute of Oceanography. Among them, victorgorgia iocasica Li, Zhan & Xu, 2020 is the first new species to be published, and the first large-scale biological new species named after the ocean. The new species name consists of the Abbreviation iocas of the Ocean Institute, plus the Latin suffix –ica (meaning to belong). Found in 2019 at a depth of 1549 meters on the Caroline Seamount in the western Pacific Ocean, the purple hydrangea coral is about 33 cm high, fan-shaped and bright purple, which means "purple gas coming from the east".
Purple gorgonian coral belongs to the coral class, the subclass of eight-stranded coral, the order soft coral, and the purple hydrangea family, all living in the deep sea, often epiphytic by the tail of the vine snake, and the red coral, the pseudo-gorgonian coral and other deep-sea hard-bottom habitats of the group of organisms, providing a habitat for many invertebrates and fish. International taxonomic research on purple hydrangea is very scarce, and only 6 species of hydrangea genus have been reported before, except for 1 species distributed in the Atlantic Ocean, the rest are all found in the Pacific Ocean. The study increased the known species of the genus to 9 species.
In this study, the taxonomic characteristics of purple hydrangea corals were compared and analyzed, and it was proposed that the bone fragment characteristics of polyps were the most reliable taxonomic traits defined for this type of species, while the gene sequences of mtMutS and COI genes commonly used to distinguish eight coral species were too conservative to distinguish between similar species. The four species involved in the study were collected from four adjacent seamounts, and there were no common species among different seamounts, suggesting that the biological connectivity between seamounts was very low.
The research was supported by the National Science and Technology Basic Resources Survey Project (2017FY100800), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41930533, 31970489) and the "Science" high-end user project. Associate researcher Li Yang is the first author of the paper, and researcher Xu Kuidong is the corresponding author of the paper.
(Reporting by Bo Keguo, correspondent Wang Min, client reporter of Dazhong Newspaper and Dazhong Daily)