Received: 30 April 2018 | Revised: 25 January 2019 | Accepted: 17 February 2019 DOI: 10.1111/ivb.12242 ORIGINAL ARTICLE Documenting neotropical diversity of phoronids with DNA barcoding of planktonic larvae Rachel Collin1 | Dagoberto E. Venera‐Pontón1 | Amy C. Driskell2 | Kenneth S. Macdonald2 | Kit‐Yu Karen Chan3 | Michael J. Boyle4 1Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Balboa, Ancon, Panama Abstract 2Laboratories of Analytical Biology, National Phoronid larvae, actinotrochs, are beautiful and complicated organisms which have Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian attracted as much, if not more, attention than their adult forms. We collected acti‐ Institution, Washington, DC 3Division of Life Science, The Hong Kong notrochs from the waters of the Pacific and Caribbean coasts of Panama, and used University of Science and Technology, Clear DNA barcoding of mtCOI, as well as 16S and 18S sequences, to estimate the diversity Water Bay, Hong Kong of phoronids in the region. We discovered three operational taxonomic units (OTUs) 4Smithsonian Marine Station, Fort Pierce, Florida in the Bay of Panama on the Pacific coast and four OTUs in Bocas del Toro on the Caribbean coast. Not only did all OTUs differ from each other by >10% pairwise dis‐ Correspondence Rachel Collin, Smithsonian Tropical tance in COI, but they also differed from all phoronid sequences in GenBank, includ‐ Research, Institute, Unit 9100, Box 0948, ing the four species for which adults have been reported for the Pacific of Panama, DPO AA 34002, USA Email:
[email protected] Phoronopsis harmeri, Phoronis psammophila, Phoronis muelleri, and Phoronis hippocre‐ pia. In each ocean region, one common OTU was more abundant and occurred more Present Address Kit‐Yu Karen Chan, Biology frequently than other OTUs in our samples.