Andrea Barco

• PhD
• Managing Director at biome-id

Zooplankton, integral to aquatic ecosystems, face diverse environmental influences. To comprehend their dynamics, critical for ecological insights and fisheries management, traditional morphological analysis proves laborious. Recent advances include automated systems like ZooScan and DNA metabarcoding. This study examines two methods on the same sa...

This report describe the first application of environmental DNA‐metabarcoding approach for the assessment of fish species diversity in two marine protected areas of the North Sea: the Doggerbank and the Sylt Outer Reef. We collected 64 water samples and detected 24 fish species. We discuss qualitative differences between MPAs and compare the result...

The long-wristed hermit crab Pagurus longicarpus is native to the East Coast of North America from the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Here we present the first record of this species in the German Wadden Sea. Sixty-one individuals of P. longicarpus were found during a regular fishery survey at nine stations in the Meldorf Bight in late...

Quantifying spawning biomass of commercially relevant fish species is important to generate fishing quotas. This will mostly rely on the annual or daily production of fish eggs. However, these have to be identified precisely to species level to obtain a reliable estimate of offspring production of the different species. Because morphological identi...

As one of the most abundant and ubiquitous representatives of marine and brackish coastal macrophytobenthos communities, the genus Ulva is not only an important primary producer but also of ecological and morphogenetic interest to many scientists. Ulva mutabilis became an important model organism to study morphogenesis and mutualistic interactions...

Invasions of freshwater habitats by marine and brackish species have become more frequent in recent years with many of those species originating from the Ponto-Caspian region. Populations of Ponto-Caspian species have successfully established in the North and Baltic Seas and their adjoining rivers, as well as in the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River r...

We used a molecular phylogenetic approach to investigate species delimitation and diversification in the northeastern Atlantic and Mediterranean musseldrills of the Ocinebrina aciculata complex, based on molecular data from topotypical material of many of the nominal taxa. The complex is shown to consist of at least five species: Ocinebrina acicula...

The Ocenebrinae is a subfamily of marine predatory gastropods known as oyster and mussel drills. Their current phylogenetic framework is traditionally based on shell and radular characters, but a consensus on relationships among genera is still lacking. We investigated the molecular phylogeny of Ocenebrinae using 50 species and DNA data from one nu...

It is generally a challenge to identify ecological drivers of Southern Ocean macrobenthic communities. Reasons are a lack of a unifying concept, the complexity of ecological relationships and the biological diversity. A catch-based macrobenthos study and a sea-bed imaging survey on acidians were carried out off the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula...

Jaminia quadridens (Mollusca: Gastropoda: Heterobranchia: Pulmonata: Stylommatophora: Enidae) is a land snail living up to 2400 m above sea level on calcareous meadow slopes. It is widely distributed in Central and Southern Europe, with two subspecies currently recognised (J. quadridens quadridens and J. quadridens elongata). Like other Enidae, the...

The Southern Ocean ecosystem at the Antarctic Peninsula has steep natural environmental gradients, e.g. in terms of water masses and ice cover, and experiences regional above global average climate change. An ecological macroepibenthic survey was conducted in three ecoregions in the north-western Weddell Sea, on the continental shelf of the Antarct...

Sequence-based specimen identification, known as DNA barcoding, is a common method complementing traditional morphology-based taxonomic assignments. The fundamental resource in DNA barcoding is the availability of a taxonomically reliable sequence database to use as a reference for sequence comparisons. Here we provide a reference library including...

During the last years DNA barcoding has become a popular method of choice for molecular specimen identification. Here we present a comprehensive DNA barcode library of various crustacean taxa found in the North Sea, one of the most extensively studied marine regions of the world. Our data set includes 1,332 barcodes covering 205 species, including...

During the last years, the effectiveness of DNA barcoding for animal species identification has been proven in many studies, analyzing both vertebrate and invertebrate taxa. In terms of marine organisms, however, most barcoding studies typically focus on economically relevant species, for example, fish, as well as on the documentation of hotspots o...

We investigated the relationships of the muricid subfamilies Haustrinae, Pagodulinae and the genus Poirieria using a molecular phylogenetic approach on a dataset of three mitochondrial genes (12S, 16S and COI). These taxa form a well-supported clade within Muricidae. The phylogenetic analysis suggests that Poirieria is the sister group of Pagodulin...

S20: ANTECO: DIVERSITY & CONNECTIVITY & SPATIAL ANALYSES OF ANTARCTIC BIODIVERSITY Phylogenetic relationships and phylogeography in Antarctic symbiotic polyxenous polychaetes Alvaro M, Barnich R, Modica M, Barco A, Oliverio M, Schiaparelli S. While the role of host preference in ecological speciation has been investigated extensively in terrestria...

We employed the COI sequences from specimens of top-shells to: (a) test the applicability of COI as a barcode marker for the trochid genus Gibbula s.l.; (b) provide a first taxonomically reliable data set of COI sequences useful for future studies; and (c) detect evidence of suspect intraspecific variability over a large geographical scale. We anal...

We used a molecular phylogenetic approach to investigate species delimitations and diversification in the mussel drills of the Ocinebrina edwardsii complex by means of a combination of nuclear (internal transcribed spacer 2, ITS2) and mitochondrial [cytochrome oxidase subunit I (COI) and 16S] sequences. Our sample included 243 specimens ascribed to...

The project BAMBi (Barcoding of Antarctic Marine Biodiversity) is a project funded by the Italian National Antarctic Program (PNRA) (Project 2010/A1.10) with the main aim of creating a first data first set of DNA-barcoding COI sequences from the Terra Nova Bay (TNB) area, for the highest possible number of species/specimens of invertebrates. Specim...

The Southern Ocean ecosystem at the Antarctic Peninsula has steep natural environmental gradients, e.g. in terms of water masses and ice cover, and experiences regional above global average climate change. An ecological macroepibenthic survey was conducted in three ecoregions in the north-western Weddell Sea, on the continental shelf of the Antarct...

Barco, A., Schiaparelli, S., Houart, R. & Oliverio, M. (2012). Cenozoic evolution of Muricidae (Mollusca, Neogastropoda) in the Southern Ocean, with the description of a new subfamily. —Zoologica Scripta, 41, 596–616. Gastropods are among the most studied group in Antarctica, and taxa with an advanced status of systematic knowledge can be used as a...

The northeastern Atlantic and Mediterranean small mussel drills of the Ocinebrina aciculata complex are here revised and consist of at least 3 species. The type species, Ocinebrina aciculata (Lamarck, 1822), characterized by a slender shell with rounded whorls and primary and secondary spiral cords of approximately similar size, lives throughout th...

The northeastern Atlantic and Mediterranean small mussel drills of the Ocinebrina aciculata complex are here revised and consist of at least 3 species. The type species, Ocinebrina aciculata (Lamarck, 1822), characterized by a slender shell with rounded whorls and primary and secondary spiral cords of approximately similar size, lives throughout th...

Several recent studies show that, in the Southern Ocean, 'symbiotic' associations are widespread and more common than previously believed. In this contribution we illustrate the ecological, morphological and molecular characterization of one of the best known Antarctic associations, the one occurring between the polyxenous polychaete Polyeunoa laev...

With over 1600 extant described species, the Muricidae are one of the most species-rich and morphologically diverse families of molluscs. As predators of molluscs, polychaetes, anthozoans barnacles and other invertebrates, they form an important component of many benthic communities. Traditionally, the classification of muricids at specific and gen...

The Coralliophilinae are a subfamily of Muricidae, with about 200-250 species, mostly from temperate and tropical oceans, that are associated with anthozoans on which they feed. We present here a phylogenetic hypothesis for the subfamily, based on DNA sequences (650 aligned positions) of the mitochondrial 12S rDNA from 42 coralliophilines and six o...

The second internal transcribed spacer (ITS2) of the nuclear ribosomal RNA cluster (rDNA) is significantly smaller in the Cnidaria (120–260 bp) than in the rest of the Metazoa. ITS2 is one of the fastest evolving DNA regions among those commonly used in molecular systematics and has been proposed as a possible barcoding gene for Cnidaria to replace...

Eleven species of the Coralliophilinae were identified on seamounts of the NE Atlantic and in the Azores. The species-level taxonomy is reviewed with emphasis on the protoconch species-specific characters. The Meteor group of seamounts yielded six species (plus two unidentified), with 3–6 species found sympatrically. Babelomurex atlantidis is descr...