How nematode morphometric attributes integrate with taxonomy-based measures along an estuarine gradient

Distribution patterns of benthic bacteria and nematode communities in estuarine sediments

“…In all sampling sites, the dominant genera were Metachromadora, Sabatieria, Axonolaimus and Terschellingia, similar composition to mud-flat areas of Mondego estuary (Alves et al, 2013) and also to the previous study in Sado estuary (Sroczyńska et al, 2021). The spatial distribution patterns base on ITD − 1 and MI indexes were also similar to those verified in Mondego, Mira and Sado estuaries (Alves et al, 2009;Materatski et al, 2015;Sroczyńska et al, 2021a). However, the trophic composition of nematode assemblages showed different results from previous studies (i. e., usually dominated by non-selective deposit feeders (1B) and epistrate feeders (2A) (Alves et al, 2013;Branco et al, 2018).…”

Towards a standardisation of morphological measurements in the phylum Kinorhyncha

“…Morphometrics have revealed to be useful for different aspects in meiofauna research, including species discrimination (Tchesunov et al, 2015;Karanovic et al, 2016;Michaloudi et al, 2018;Kim et al, 2021), sexual dimorphism (Da Silva et al, 2009), detection of evolutionary patterns (Cepeda et al, 2019b;Cerca et al, 2019), ecological adaptations (Bell et al, 1987;Cepeda et al, 2020a;Grzelak et al, 2020), and functional diversity (Sroczyńska et al, 2021). In Kinorhyncha, specifically, measurements of selected body traits have been traditionally included in all formal descriptions of new species since the very beginning (Greeff 1869;Zelinka 1928;Blake 1930).…”