Environmental DNA analysis of cephalopods off the Azores

DOI

Fundamental insight on predator-prey dynamics in the deep sea is hampered by a lack of combined data on hunting behavior and prey spectra. Deep-sea niche segregation may evolve when predators target specific prey communities, but this hypothesis remains untested. We combined environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding with biologging to assess cephalopod community composition in the deep-sea foraging habitat of two top predator cetaceans. Here, we are presenting the eDNA data from seawater samples obtained during a cruise on RV Pelagia in 2018 off Terceira, Azores, sampled directly in the foraging habitats of two cetacean top-predators from the surface to 1600 m. The water was collected using Niskin bottles mounted on a CTD rosette at seven or eight depths in biological triplicates and filtered on sterile Sterivex filter. After DNA extraction and PCR amplification with two universal cephalopod primer (Ceph18S, targeting the nuclear 18S rRNA gene and CephMLS targeting the mitochondrial 16S rRNA gene), the samples were sequenced on an Illumina MiSeq with the MiSeq Reagent kit v3 (600 cycles).

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.926840
Related Identifier IsSupplementTo https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abf5908
Metadata Access https://ws.pangaea.de/oai/provider?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=datacite4&identifier=oai:pangaea.de:doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.926840
Provenance
Creator Visser, Fleur ORCID logo; Merten, Veronique ORCID logo; Bayer, Till ORCID logo; Oudejans, Machiel G ORCID logo; de Jonge, Danielle ORCID logo; Puebla, Oscar ORCID logo; Reusch, Thorsten B H ORCID logo; Fuss, Janina ORCID logo; Hoving, Henk-Jan T ORCID logo
Publisher PANGAEA
Publication Year 2021
Rights Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
OpenAccess true
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Format text/tab-separated-values
Size 10 data points
Discipline Earth System Research
Spatial Coverage (-27.445W, 38.598S, -27.266E, 38.690N); North Atlantic Ocean
Temporal Coverage Begin 2018-07-23T00:00:00Z
Temporal Coverage End 2018-07-24T06:00:00Z