Cruise TAN1810 - Chatham Rise New Zealand - water and sediment traps - eukaryotes 18S V4 metabarcodes

This NIWA voyage TAN1810 - led by Dr. Moira Decima and NIWA scientists in partnership with multiple international collaborators - starting on 23 October 2018, focused on the special role salps play in carbon cycling, and where they fit in marine food webs off the New Zealand coast. Salps are jelly-like marine animals, shaped like barrel, that combine swimming with moving by pumping water through a feeding filter. They play a unique ecological and biogeochemical role as extensive grazers of some of the smallest marine phytoplankton. Eukaryotic community composition samples were collected from samples of the water collected from 6 depths within the euphotic zone, filtering 1.4 -2.4L per depth. Samples from PIT were collected from four depths and typically contents of one full tube were filtered per sample. Sample collection consisted of filtering contents through Polycarbonate filter (Poretics). The filter was flash frozen in liquid nitrogen and stored at -80 C until processing. DNA was extracted using DNeasy mini kit (Qiagen, Germany) - Qiagen DNA easy Blood and tissue. 18S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing was carried out using V4F Illumina (CCAGCASCYGCGGTAATTCC ) and V4AZig Illumina (ACTTTCGTTCTTGATYRATGA ) barcoded primer set (Piredda, R. et al. Diversity and temporal patterns of planktonic protist assemblages at a Mediterranean Long Term Ecological Research site. FEMS Microbiol. Ecol. 93, (2017)).