Abstract
This paper reports a recently discovered population of Caulerpa prolifera in the Azores (NE Atlantic), which becomes the westernmost record of this species in European waters. Morphological, anatomical and molecular characters were investigated for species recognition. The occurrence of the species in the Azores represents a northern expansion of its distributional range, covering now the whole Macaronesia region. It may have been brought by rafting from the western Atlantic through the Gulf Stream, but human-assisted transport may also have been involved in its arrival or dispersion.
About the authors
Eva Cacabelos is a post-doctoral researcher and has extensive experience in the analysis of factors affecting littoral communities. She has participated in projects investigating the effects of invasions, climate change or anthropogenic perturbations in benthic communities, as well as related to valorization of marine resources. She is well acquainted with the methods of investigating effects of non-indigenous species in littoral systems.
João Faria holds a PhD in Biology from the University of Lisbon and has been accumulating considerable knowledge on coastal habitats. He has proven to be skillful in applying experimental ecology designs and molecular and genetic tools to better understand how biological diversity is generated and infer the ecological and environmental forces that have contributed to the structure and connectivity of marine populations.
María Altamirano is an associate professor of Botany at University of Málaga. Her main research topics at the present are ecology and physiology of invasive seaweeds, with special interest in those recorded in the Mediterranean Sea and Galápagos Islands, species of Asparagopsis and Caulerpa genus. Furthermore, she continues studying seaweed biodiversity in Spain, and recently in Galápagos. She is Secretary of the Phycological Society of Spain.
Willem Prud’homme van Reine is a retired marine botanist at the Rijksherbarium, Leiden, The Netherlands, which at first became the National Herbarium of The Netherlands and later the Botanical Section of the Naturalis Biodiversity Center. He is a specialist in biogeography (marine, NW Atlantic), and taxonomy of Sphacelariales and Caulerpales.
Ana Isabel Neto is a professor at the University of Azores and since 1988 investigates on marine botany and coastal ecology, using macroalgae as model organisms and the Azorean littoral communities as model systems. Currently leading the Island Aquatic Ecology SubGroup of the Azorean Biodiversity Group, she coordinates the Herbarium AZB Ruy Telles Palhinha of DB/UAc which is an important resource for academics, students, government, private organizations, and the general public. She is and has been actively involved in projects with regional enterprises, mainly in the areas of sustainable exploitation, biotechnology and aquaculture of marine resources.
Acknowledgments
Funding was provided from National Funds through FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, under the projects UID/BIA/00329/2013, UID/BIA/50027/2013, POCI-01-0145-FEDER-006821 and DRCT-M1.1.a/005/Funcionamento-C/2016. GMM and DG were supported by post-doctoral grants awarded by FCT, respectively SFRH/BDP/108114/2015 and SFRH/BPD/64963/2009. EC benefitted from a post-doctoral fellowship awarded by ARDITI Grant Programme Madeira 14-20, Funder Id: 10.13039/501100001871 (M1420-09-5369-FSE-000001). We thank Ricardo Camarinho for helping with the histological analyses. We are also thankful to the anonymous reviewers and to Prof. Matthew J. Dring for their helpful comments and suggestions.
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Supplementary Material
The online version of this article offers supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/bot-2018-0075).
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