Biodiversity of Loricifera from the plateau of the Great Meteor Seamount

No abstracts are to be cited without prior reference to the author.

The investigation showed that the Great Meteor Seamount is a littoral habitat which despite its isolation by a permanent circular current and being surrounded by soft deep-sea bottoms, harbours an astonishingly diverse interstitial meiofauna. Studies of the Loricifera resulted in the discovery of 14 new species on the plateau of the Great Meteor Seamount. Apart from two new taxa all known genera are represented in the material (Nanaloricus, Pliciloricus and Rugiloricus). The study revealed that: (1) loriciferans are not a rare meiobenthic group on the seamount. (2) species of the deep sea do not occur on the plateau and vice versa. (3) larval instars make up 97% of all specimens found, which may be related to a newly discovered paedogenetic life cycle.