Initially, I identified nine groups, based on a set of broad, morphological characters that were hypothesized to represent distinct lineages. specimens housed in museums and institutes around the world (Smithsonian: National Museum of Natural History Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard Yale Peabody Museum Iziko South African Museum Natural History Museum, London Natural History Museum of Denmark Museum Nacional, Brazil The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, New Zealand The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Australia Harvey Mudd College, USA). However, while previous analyses of Chrysogorgiidae using mtMutS, 18S and mt COI markers showed that Chrysogorgia appears monophyletic, and also showed the congruence of genetic variation in mtMutS with discrete morphologies for four Atlantic species, in each case only a small number of taxa (600) of Chrysogorgia s.l.

Molecular methods have become a valuable tool in taxonomy, providing additional characters which can guide distinction between morphologically similar taxa. The genus required comprehensive taxonomic revision because its species displayed such a widely varying range of morphological characters it was suspected to be polyphyletic. An improved knowledge of the taxonomy of Chrysogorgia is important because the genus is distributed globally, in a wide range of depths and is among the most speciose of all soft corals – including species established as ecologically important and VME indicator taxa. My research comprised two primary topics: an integrative taxonomic investigation within a species-rich but poorly documented genus of octocorals, Chrysogorgia Duchassaing & Michelotti, 1864, using morphological taxonomy and molecular methods. VMEs are frequently used as the spatial units on which management of threatening activities in the deep-sea is based. Accordingly, octocorals are focal taxa for the conservation management of deep-sea marine environments globally and are a prominent indicator taxon of Vulnerable Marine Ecosystems (VMEs).

Because octocorals typically grow slowly and are long-lived, they are vulnerable to impacts from human activities such as bottom fishing and seabed mining. Octocorals are among the most abundant and diverse components of deep-sea ecosystems where many are large ‘tree-forming’ species that form habitat and refugia for other marine fauna. My PhD research program has focussed on a prominent and ecologically important group of sessile marine invertebrates, the octocorals, colloquially referred to as soft corals or sea fans. Untiedt, CB ORCID: 0000-0003-1562-3473 2022, 'A taxonomic revision of the Gold Coral genus Chrysogorgia (Coelenterata: Octocorallia: Alcyonacea: Chrysogorgiidae) using a combined morphological and molecular approach, and alternative methods for assessing diversity of deep-sea octocorals in underwater imagery', PhD thesis, University of Tasmania.įull text not available from this repository.

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