Moorea Under the Scope

Saron marmoratus, unusual color morph of the Saron Shrimp, collected in Moorea.

It is the sort of quest that Charles Darwin might have conceived: to catalog every living species on a tropical island in the South Pacific, including those in the seas surrounding it. Indeed, Darwin himself might have selected Moorea, French Polynesia, as his target, having viewed its jagged peaks rising out of blue watersa sight that inspired his early theories on the formation of islands and the role of reef-building stony corals in creating atolls.

The three-year Moorea Biocode Project has set out to inventory the DNA sequences of all non-microbial aquatic and terrestrial life forms in Moorea, a massive undertaking calling on the involvement of international teams of researchers in many disciplines from marine invertebrate zoology to rainforest botany.

The French Polynesian island of Moorea, west of Tahiti in the Society Islands, from space. A 59-km (37-mile) coastal road encircles the mountainous island. NASA Astronaut Photo.

Nobody has ever sequenced a single place to this level, says Gustav Paulay, the team leader for marine invertebrates from the University of Florida and curator of marine malacology at the Universitys Florida Museum of Natural History. And nobody has ever investigated coral reef biodiversity this thoroughly in one place.

The genetic information collected is part of a whole-system approach that will be used to study ecological processes in depth across the entire island. Mooreas coral reefs, in particular, are considered crucial indicators of how natural systems respond to climate change.  While entomologists net butterflies in the lush, green countryside of the island, and botanists pluck, photograph, and preserve the foliage of tropical vegetation, the reef investigators from Florida do up to three collection trips a day in search of shrimp, crabs, mollusks, worms, and plankton.

If the grand goal of the project is wildly ambitious, it is not the usual expedition by underfunded field researchers. The work is sponsored by a $5.2 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, a San Franciscobased philanthropy with a long history of supporting scientific research. (Think of the Moorea Project when you notice the Intel Inside logo on your laptop; Gordon Moore is a co-founder and former CEO of the computer-chip maker.) The grant has helped bring together a global team of scientists and their graduate students from many institutions and countries.

The New and The Weird

Keeping organized is a key to the research, and the reef invertebrate team from the University of Florida works methodically, grouping the larger specimens they collect by appearance. The researchers select individual specimens from each grouping to photograph and take tissue samples from. The samples are sent to an on-site DNA extractor for immediate preparation, and the DNA is shipped to the Smithsonian Institution for sequencing.

Exoclimenella denticulata, a carid shrimp collected by Gustav Pauley's University of Florida invertebrate team in Moorea.

We can answer all these things in ecology and evolution and resource management if we have a dictionary to the DNA, Paulay said. Were building that dictionary.
Attempting to collect all species of marine invertebrates around the 134-sq-km island is a daunting task, and to meet the challenge, Paulays team divides its finds into three sizes: macro (anything longer than four-tenths of an inch), meso (smaller but visible), and micro (less than 1 mm in length).

Paulay hopes to cover the macro fauna effectively, but even that is impossible in the initial time frame, he says. Rare things live in strange places, he points out. Other things migrate into the area every couple of years. Meso-organisms are even more difficult. Paulays team uses a number of extractive methods, such as shaking them out of sand and rock, to get as many unique specimens as possible.

Microfauna are the most challenging of all. The coral reefs are full of them, like microscopic plankton in sea water and minute worms in sand and rock. Paulays team is exploring methods of community DNA extraction. This approach involves running a simultaneous DNA analysis on all organisms found in a sample, such as sand. Cluster patterns in the DNA sequences will help indicate individual species. Modern technology can sequence millions of genes at once, making the technique possible.

Squat lobster, Galathea pilosa, found off Moorea. Photo by Arthur Anker from the BioCode Project's flikr Photostream.

Larger invertebrates are easier to find, but they still provide plenty of surprises.
Youre always expecting to see things you havent seen before, Paulay said. Just about every day theres some really weird thing coming in.

Paulay estimates that more than 5 percent of the macrofauna his team collects are new genera and species. The team recently found a new species of crab in deep water that looks like a transition species between a hermit crab and a free-moving crab. It wears a clam shell instead of a snail shell, and its main body has a crab-like triangular shape.

Pauley believes the vast amount of information being compiled from Moorea will generate and inspire further research with significance far beyond remote French Polynesia. The Moorea Project is a part of the Barcode Consortium, a global initiative to generate a unique barcode for all species on the planet and make the results freely available to scientists in all countries.

Further Reading:
http://www.mooreabiocode.org/
http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/
http://www.moore.org/