Trends in Sea Anemone Diversity with Latitude

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Trends in Sea Anemone Diversity with Latitude
Justin Buck Ecology and Evolutionary Biology,
University of Kansas Natural History Museum

• Question
• Does a latitudinal pattern of diversity exist for
  sea anemones as it does for terrestrial organisms?

• Sea anemone localities were taken from
  Hexacorallians of the World (http//hercules.
  kgs.ku.edu/hexacoral/anemone2/index.cfm)

Normalized area and coastline length
Raw Data

• With area and coastline length normalization,
  highest diversity is at temperate latitudes

• Sea anemones are benthic marine animals found
  in every ocean and at all depths
• There are 1070 valid species of sea anemones

Original descriptions per year

• For terrestrial organisms high diversity exists
  at the equator with attenuation toward the poles

• Number of original descriptions has been
  declining

of Publications

• Conclusion
• The common latitudinal gradient that exists for
  most terrestrial organisms does not exist for sea
  anemones. I conclude, after reviewing the raw
  numbers and the normalizations to the data, that
  sea anemone diversity is highest at temperate
  latitudes and is lower in the tropics and at the
  polar latitudes.

Not all 10 bands are the same size, so the ocean
area and coastline length were taken from the
environmental database (http//hercules.kgs.ku
.edu/hexacoral/anemone2/index.cfm) to normalize
the data
Acknowledgments
NSF REU Supplement to Grant DEB-9978106 (PEET)
All the researchers from the lab of Dr. Daphne
Fautin at the University of Kansas