Abstract

The ocean’s surface is a unique environment, characterized by a variety of environmental stressors and high concentrations of organic matter. This environment is home to floating marine organisms, including animals, bacteria, plankton, and algae. The free-living animals of this ecosystem, known as the neuston, are diverse, with a wide variety of adaptations to survive at the ocean’s surface. They play important ecosystem roles and connect disparate marine food webs. The first goal of this project was to characterize the distributions of several important neustonic animal genera. To do this, nearly 4,000 observations from dozens of sources were collected, and then generated minimum bounding polygons were generated to outline the ranges in which they occur. After determining these minimum ranges, Bayesian additive regression trees, a new species distribution modeling algorithm, were used to identify the most important environmental correlates to the range of each species. For thirteen of fifteen taxa, temperature range or temperature mean were ranked as the most important variables, corresponding with the finding that the ranges of most neustonic species exhibited variation primarily in latitude, with strong latitudinal upper and lower bounds. These findings correspond with and expand upon the existing literature on the neuston, highlighting the importance of revisiting historical records using new strategies and tools.

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