Ribosomal DNA shows extremely low genetic divergence in a world-wide distributed, but disjunct and highly adapted marine protozoan (Virgulinella fragilis, Foraminiferida)

Funding

We are grateful to the crew members of the research vessel RAUKAWA CHALLENGER at the Island Bay Marine Laboratory, Victoria University of Wellington; and the crew members of the research vessel FS METEOR (cruise M57-3) for their help in collecting sediment samples; Dr. K. Oguri, Dr. T. Toyofuku, Dr. S. Sakai of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) and Dr. S. Kawagata of Yokohama National University for their cooperation in environmental observation and sampling at Namako-ike and Wellington Harbor; Mr. S. Higashi, Planning Division of Kamikoshiki Village Office for arranging the sampling; Mr. M. Kawato, JAMSTEC, for technical assistance in DNA sequencing; and Mr. K. Uematsu and Ms. T. Takahashi for their help with SEM observations. We also thank Dr. A. Stamatakis for performing the ML analyses with RAxML. We are very grateful to three anonymous reviewers and Dr. Ellen Thomas for their valuable comments on the manuscript. This work was supported by funds from the Institute for Research on Earth Evolution of JAMSTEC and Research Fellowships from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science for Young Scientists (no. 9358 to M. Tsuchiya), a Grant-in-Aid for Exploratory Research from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (no. 16654081 to H. Kitazato), and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, to C. Hemleben and V. Hemleben (He 697/36), which are gratefully acknowledged.