Davide Maggioni

• PhD Biology
• Researcher at Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca

Zanclea divergens is a tropical hydrozoan living in symbiotic association with bryozoans and currently reported from Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, and Maldives. Here, we used an integrative approach to assess the morpho-molecular diversity of the species across the Indo-Pacific. Phylogenetic and species delimitation analyses based on seven mitochond...

The Odonata are considered among the most endangered freshwater faunal taxa. Their DNA‐based monitoring relies on validated reference datasets that are often lacking or do not cover important biogeographical centres of diversification. This study presents the results of a DNA barcoding campaign on Odonata, based on the standard 658 bp 5’ end region...

Scleractinian corals provide habitats for a broad variety of cryptofauna, which in turn may contribute to the overall functioning of coral symbiomes. Among these invertebrates, hydrozoans belonging to the genus Zanclea represent an increasingly known and ecologically important group of coral symbionts. In this study, we analysed 321 Zanclea colonie...

The hydrozoan family Cladocorynidae inhabits tropical to temperate waters and comprises the two genera Pteroclava and Cladocoryne. Pteroclava lives in association with some octocorals and hydrozoans, whereas Cladocoryne is more generalist in terms of substrate choice. This work provides a thorough morpho-molecular reassessment of the Cladocorynidae...

An integrated approach using morphological and genetic data is needed to disentangle taxonomic uncertainties affecting the hydrozoan families Sphaerocorynidae and Zancleopsidae. Here we used this approach to accurately characterise species in these families, identify the previously unknown polyp stages of the genera Euphysilla and Zancleopsis, whic...

Understanding of non-geniculate coralline algal (NGCA) diversity, prevalence, and distribution in the tropical western North Atlantic is currently limited by reliance on morphological and anatomical features that are inadequate for species identifications. Reef surveys from two study sites, the Florida Keys (Florida, USA) and Roatán (Honduras), pro...

Background Understanding how endangered species respond to climatic changes is fundamental for their conservation. Due to its restricted geographic range, its sensitivity to the ongoing global warming and its continuing decline, the Southwestern-Alpine endemic wolf spider Vesubia jugorum is currently classified as Endangered in the IUCN Red List. H...

Crustaceans are one of the most widespread and speciose groups of marine organisms, fulfilling multiple ecological roles in numerous ecosystems. On coral reefs, many crustacean species form associations with scleractinian corals. Although the Red Sea is considered a biodiversity hotspot, few studies examined the diversity of coral-associated crusta...

Gerromorpha Popov, 1971 is a fascinating and diverse insect lineage that evolved about 200 Mya to spend their entire life cycle on the air-water interface and have since colonized all types of aquatic habitats. The sub-family Halobatinae Bianchi, 1896 is particularly interesting because some species have adapted to life on the open ocean-a habitat...

Black corals occur as part of benthic assemblages from shallow to deep waters in all oceans. Despite the importance in many benthic ecosystems, where these act as biodiversity aggregators, antipatharians remain poorly studied, with 75% of the known species occurring below recreational SCUBA diving depth limits. Currently, information regarding the...

Capitate hydrozoans are a morphologically and ecologically diverse hydrozoan suborder, currently including about 200 species. Being grouped in two clades, Corynida and Zancleida, these hydrozoans still show a number of taxonomic uncertainties at the species, genus and family levels. Many Capitata species established symbiotic relationships with oth...

The present study provides a morphological account of six tropical hydroids, of which four are described as new. Halecium turbinariae sp. nov. grows exclusively on brown algae of the genus Turbinaria (Phaeophyceae: Fucales), and contains numerous zooxanthellae in its coenosarc. Nemalecium caeruleus sp. nov. occurs in a peculiar ecological niche, vi...

The acrothoracican genus Berndtia Utinomi, 1950 includes small barnacles known to bore into the calcareous skeleton of living scleractinian corals of the genera Psammocora Dana, 1846 and Leptastrea Milne Edwards & Haime, 1849. The six known species of Berndtia are restricted to the tropical Western Pacific. We provide the first record of Berndtia f...

Nudibranchs have a mostly carnivorous diet, and they prey on a wide variety of other animal taxa. Many species, mainly belonging to the Cladobranchia suborder, feed on cnidarians, including member of the class Hydrozoa. Several hydrozoan species display a symbiotic lifestyle, being associated with other benthic invertebrates, including for instance...

Eleven species of hydroids belonging to the genus Zygophylax Quelch, 1885 are present in the material collected by the KANACONO, KANADEEP and KANADEEP 2 expeditions of the French Tropical Dee-Sea Benthos Program. Of these, ten represent known taxa and are fertile specimens, while the last one is unidentifiable in the absence of its gonosome. Seven...

Microplastics are a persistent and ubiquitous source of pollution in the marine environment, representing a severe threat to tropical coral reefs. The effects of microplastics on reef building (hard) corals have been documented (interference with normal digestion process, polyp retraction, oxidative stress, impairment of the photosynthetic machiner...

The structure of an ecosystem is usually determined by the shape of the organisms that build it, commonly known as ecosystem engineers. Understanding to what extent plasticity and environmental filtering determine variation in the physical structure of ecosystem engineers is necessary to predict how ecosystem structure may change. Here, we explored...

Habitat fragmentation affects biodiversity, but with unclear effects on pollinators and their interactions with plants in anthropized landscapes. Islands could serve as open air laboratories, suitable to disentangle how land-use alteration impacts pollination ecology. In Maldive islands we investigated how pollinator richness, plant-pollinator inte...

Waminoa spp. are acoel flatworms mainly found as ectosymbionts on scleractinian corals. Although Waminoa could potentially represent a threat to their hosts, not enough information is available yet regarding their ecology and effect on the coral. Here, the Waminoa sp.–coral association was analyzed in Singapore reefs to determine the prevalence, ho...

The Stylasteridae, commonly known as lace corals, is a family of colonial calcifying hydrozoans mostly inhabiting deep waters. Stylasterids show a cosmopolitan distribution but, in some areas, they are characterized by low species diversity, such as in the Red Sea, where only a shallow-water species has been reported so far. With this work, we prov...

The cushion seastar Culcita schmideliana has gained major attention in the last few years because of its selective predation on juvenile corals, as well as its ability to generate large demographic assemblages, causing delays in coral recovery after large mortality events in the Republic of Maldives. However, a lack of data regarding the factors af...

The octocoral family Alcyoniidae represents a rich source of bioactive substances with intriguing and unique structural features. This review aims to provide an updated overview of the compounds isolated from Alcyoniidae and displaying potential cytotoxic activity. In order to allow a better comparison among the bioactive compounds, we focused on m...

Coral restoration initiatives are gaining significant momentum in a global effort to enhance the recovery of degraded coral reefs. However, the implementation and upkeep of coral nurseries are particularly demanding, so that unforeseen breaks in maintenance operations might jeopardize well established projects. In the last two years, the COVID‐19 p...

Habitat fragmentation is known to affect biodiversity, but the impact on pollinators and their interactions with plants is still unclear in anthropized landscapes. Islands are open-air laboratories for ecological studies with simplified communities and interactions, suitable to disentangle how land-use alteration impacts pollination ecology and its...

The genus Sciurella Allman, 1883 is reassessed based on fertile specimens from Indonesia and Australia, using both morphological and genetic approaches. The genus is resurrected and kept distinct from Nemertesia Lamouroux, 1812 on the account of its long, tubular hydrothecae, and the gonothecae (of which only the female ones are known) provided wit...

Coral Reef Restoration In article number 2100089, Marco Contardi, Simone Montanoand, Athanassia Athanassiou and co-workers fabricate two biodegradable biocomposites based on starch–polydimethylsiloxane and soybean lecithin-wax-polyurethane. They are evaluated as scaffolds for the growth of oceanic organisms. Such materials placed underwater on the...

The structure of ecosystems is usually determined by the shape of the organisms that build it, commonly known as ecosystem engineers. Understanding to what extent plasticity and environmental filtering determine variation in ecosystem engineer physical structure is necessary to predict how ecosystem structure may change. Here, we explored coral sur...

Species delimitation of corals is one of the most challenging issues in coral reef ecology and conservation. Morphology can obscure evolutionary relationships, and molecular datasets are consistently revealing greater within-species diversity than currently understood. Most phylogenetic studies, however, have examined narrow geographic areas and ph...

Ten species belonging to the genus Gonaxia Vervoort, 1993 occur in recent collections gathered by KANACONO (2016), KANADEEP (2017) and KANADEEP 2 (2019) expeditions of the French Tropical Deep-Sea Benthos Program in deep waters of the New Caledonian region. They were studied using the classical, morphological approach, supplemented by the first gen...

Coral reefs are among the most diverse ecosystems in the world. The diversity of life found in the habitats created by corals is so large that the reefs are known as the “rainforests of the sea.” Unfortunately, severe natural and anthropogenic changes such as ocean warming, acidification, coral diseases, and plastic pollution are extremely detrimen...

Molecular-based approaches for species identification and delimitation strongly relies, in terms of universality and efficiency, on the selected markers. Conventionally, when adopting a DNA barcoding approach to discriminate (or identify) metazoans species, the marker choice falls on the 658 base pair region at the 5’ end of the mitochondrial COI g...

Beyond the tropical paradise and beyond the fear of climate change effects, the Maldives is a fascinating island country that faces social, cultural, economic and environmental transformations. Atolls of the Maldives: Nissology and Geography provides a spatial analysis on some key challenges the Maldivian society has to deal with, and guides the re...

Among the thecate hydroids brought back by the Proteus-Guyane 2017 expedition of the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle of Paris, France, from French Guiana, two interesting species are reported upon. The plumulariid Callicarpa gracilis Fewkes, 1881, known so far from the type specimen only, is comprehensively redescribed 140 years after its orig...

A colorimetric assay, exploiting the combination of loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) with DNA barcoding, was developed to address the authentication of some cephalopod species, a relevant group in the context of seafood traceability, due to the intensive processing from the fishing sites to the shelf. The discriminating strategy relies...

Aquatic macroinvertebrates are a primary component of freshwater ecosystems and one of the most threatened by anthropogenic pressures. Among them, dragonflies are a charismatic group of growing scientific and social interest. However, little is known about the natural history of several species. One paradigmatic example is the declining Orthetrum n...

Interspecific associations are common in coral reefs, but those involving hydrozoans and octocorals have not been widely investigated. The hydroid Pteroclava krempfi (Hydrozoa, Cladocorynidae) lives in association with different soft coral taxa (Alcyonacea), showing a widespread distribution. However, very little information is available on the eco...

The so far monotypic genus Sibogella Billard, 1911 is revised based on literature data. Its type species, S. erecta Billard, 1911, is thoroughly redescribed and illustrated, and accounts on two new congeners, S. flabellata sp. nov. from shallow waters of Indonesia and S. spissa sp. nov. from deep waters of New Caledonia, are provided. Single- (16S...

Corals show spatial acclimatisation to local environment conditions. However, the various cellular mechanisms involved in local acclimatisation and variable bleaching patterns in corals remain to be thoroughly understood. In this study, the modulation of a protein implicated in cellular heat stress tolerance, the Heat shock protein 70, was compared...

This study reports on 25 species of hydroids occurring in the collections gathered during KANACONO and KANADDEP expeditions carried out in the SE of New Caledonia in 2016, and off the western coast of the island in 2017, respectively. Of these, 19 have not been dealt with in earlier reports on these collections. Two new genera and four new species...

APPENDIX S6: Multi-approach species delimitation of the 31 Zygoptera and 57 Anisoptera species investigated in this study based on Holarctic COI DNA barcode sequences from DS2. A Bayesian tree is used as a base to summarize the two threshold-based (OT and ABGD) and four character explicit-based (PTP, MPTP, GMYC, bGMYC) approaches. Specimen haplotyp...

The Odonata are considered among the most endangered freshwater faunal taxa. Their DNA-based monitoring relies on validated reference datasets that are often lacking or do not cover important biogeographical centres of diversification. This study presents the results of a DNA barcoding campaign on Odonata, based on the standard 658 bp 5’ end region...

Coral diseases are emerging as a major threat to coral reefs worldwide, and although many of them have been described, knowledge on their epizootiology is still limited. This is the case of the Halofolliculina ciliate infections, recognized as the skeletal eroding band (SEB) and Caribbean ciliate infection (CCI), two diseases caused by ciliates bel...

Mesophotic coral reefs are ecosystems found below 30 m and down to 150 m depth. Even though interest in these ecosystems has increased in recent years, several aspects still need further attention, including symbiotic associations. During survey of the upper mesophotic reefs in Faafu Atoll, Republic of Maldives, we observed a stable, and likely mut...

Green fluorescence is a common phenomenon in marine invertebrates and is caused by green fluorescent proteins. Many hydrozoan species display fluorescence in their polyps and/or medusa stages, and in a few cases patterns of green fluorescence have been demonstrated to differ between closely related species. Hydrozoans are often characterized by the...

Coral bleaching represents the most serious threat to contemporary coral reefs. In response, focus is being laid on understanding the cellular processes involved in the response of corals to the environmental stresses and the molecular mechanisms that determine the bleaching patterns. In the present study, a component of the cellular stress respons...

Mesophotic coral ecosystems are widespread and harbour rich coral reef communities below 30 m and down to 150 m depth (Puglise et al. 2009). Although in recent years the knowledge of these charismatic ecosystems has increased (Khang et al. 2014), many aspects are still to be explored, including for instance symbiotic associations. Sessile reef inve...

Food-item authentication and traceability is an issue of primary concern, due to both socio-economical and health implications. DNA-based methods are increasingly being recognised as powerful tools to assess the reliability of supplier labels for any type of food. This is especially true for products characterised by a short shelf life and high-pro...

Hydrozoans of the genus Zanclea have been acknowledged only recently as a fundamental component of the highly diverse fauna associated with reef‐building scleractinian corals. Although widely distributed in coral reefs and demonstrated to be important in protecting corals from predation and diseases, the biodiversity of these hydrozoans remains eni...

Although corallivory is recognized as a threat affecting the structure and integrity of coral reef habitats, ecological data on most species of coral consumers remain limited, slowing down the development of conservation and restoration strategies of the reef ecosystems. In this study, the population distribution and corallivorous behaviour of the...

Fire corals of the hydrocoral genus Millepora provide an important ecological role as framework builders of coral reefs in the Indo-Pacific and the Atlantic. Recent works have demonstrated the incongruence between molecular data and the traditional taxonomy of Millepora spp. based on overall skeleton growth form and pores. In an attempt to establis...

In corals, different biological processes are associated with the daily variation of temperature and light, which in shallow reefs can vary widely and regularly reach extreme levels. The expression of cellular defense mechanisms such as the heat shock proteins Hsp70 and Hsp60 was analyzed in coral colonies adapted to live in a shallow lagoon, durin...

The Zancleidae is a hydrozoan family that currently comprises three genera and 42 nominal species. The validity of numerous taxa in this family still needs to be assessed with integrative analyses and complete life cycle descriptions. The vast majority of its species live symbiotically with other organisms, among which cheilostomate bryozoans are t...

This work is the first attempt to assess the biodiversity of the Hydrozoa in the Archipiélago de Bocas del Toro (Panamá, Caribbean Sea) using morphology and molecular taxonomy, and to produce field identification tools to help future identification and monitoring efforts in the area. We sampled, identified, vouchered, and barcoded 112 specimens of...

Using a ~ 600 bps fragment of the mitochondrial 16S gene, we reconstruct the phylogenetic history of the species complex Pennaria disticha and of the genus Turritopsis. P. disticha and, within the genus Turritopsis, Turritopsis dohrnii are considered invasive species with a very broad geographical range. We show that the invasive T. dohrnii has rea...

Several hydroids, corresponding to various morphotypes included earlier in the synonymy of Halopteris polymorpha (Billard, 1913), occur in materials obtained recently from Indonesia and the Maldives, or are housed in the collection of the Muséum d’histoire naturelle of Geneva, Switzerland. Among them, new specimens, indistinguishable morphologicall...

The early origin and evolutionary radiation of graptolites (Hemichordata: Pterobranchia) is a story told almost entirely in the fossil record, but for four extant species of the genus Rhabdopleura. Here we report the discovery of a fifth species, Rhabdopleura recondita sp. nov., at a depth range of -2 to -70 m from the Adriatic and Ionian Seas, alw...

The early origin and evolutionary radiation of graptolites (Hemichordata : Pterobranchia) is a story told almost entirely in the fossil record, but for four extant species of the genus Rhabdopleura Allman, 1869. Here we report the discovery of a fifth species, Rhabdopleura recondita, sp. nov., at a depth range of 2–70 m from the Adriatic and Ionian...