About the project
The deep, cold waters of the Southern Ocean are home to enigmatic, morphologically unusual radiation of sea urchins belonging to the Holasteroida. This project aims to use a unique collection of these rare species to uncover the evolutionary history of body plans and adaptive radiations in the polar benthos.
Understanding how animals have adapted to extreme environments is of fundamental importance for understanding the evolutionary process in a changing world. The Holasteroida, a primarily deep-water, highly morphologically derived group of sea urchins are amongst the least understood members of the deep Southern Ocean benthos, a region in which they appear to be diverse. Although most are theorized to be epibenthic deposit feeders, little is known about their development, life history or ecology. In part, this reflects their thin and extremely fragile tests –inhabiting the seafloor below or close to the Carbonate Compensation Depth and protected from currents while submerged in soft substrata, they are often crushed during collection.
This novel, interdisciplinary project seeks to understand the ways in which Holasteroids have adapted to life in an extreme environment, to determine whether the Southern Ocean acts as a cradle for deep sea diversity and what this suggests about speciation on the bathyal and abyssal sea floor. Using high-resolution 3D-morphometrics and a unique collection of near pristine specimens held at the Natural History Museum (NHM), the student will use phylogenetic and statistical modelling to characterize growth and development in the evolution of the Holasteroid body plan. This will be combined with phylogenetic, molecular and biogeographical data to test hypotheses around the functional ecology, evolutionary history and biogeography of the clade. With a supervisory team spanning the NHM, University of Southampton, and British Antarctic Survey, this project will greatly improve our knowledge of the Holasteroida, and adaptive radiations in the deep sea.
You will also be supervised by organisations other than the University of Southampton, including:
- Dr Imran Rahman and Dr Hugh Carter from the Natural History Museum
- Dr Katrin Linse and Dr Rowan Whittle from the British Antarctic Survey
