Newly identified nematodes from the Great Salt Lake are associated with microbialites and specially adapted to hypersaline conditions

Extreme environments enable the study of simplified food-webs and serve as models for evolutionary bottlenecks and early Earth ecology. We investigated the biodiversity of invertebrate meiofauna in the benthic zone of the Great Salt Lake (GSL), UT, one of the most hypersaline lake systems in the world. The hypersaline bays within the GSL are currently thought to support only two multicellular animals: brine fly larvae and brine shrimp. Here, we report the presence, habitat, and microbial interactions of novel free-living nematodes. Nematode diversity drops dramatically along a salinity gradient from a freshwater river into the south arm of the lake. In Gilbert Bay, nematodes primarily inhabit reef-like organosedimentary structures built by bacteria called microbialites. These structures likely provide a protective barrier to UV and aridity, and bacterial associations within them may support life in hypersaline environments. Notably, sampling from Owens Lake, another terminal lake in the..., Detailed methods can be found in the corresponding manuscript. , , ## Great Salt Lake nematodes

In this Dryad dataset, you'll find an excel file with 6 datasheets, each containing raw data from our manuscript on halophilic nematodes living in the Great Salt Lake, UT, published in Proceedings B in 2024. These datasheets include:

* Envi Analysis: Each row here is a soil sample from one of our 6 sampling sites. Most of the variables are self explanatory (data sampled, time, etc). Temp, ORP, and Salinity *in situ* are measurements from the conductivity meter that were taken at the time of sampling in the lake. Volume (ml) is the volume of sample from which we extracted nematodes. N worms is the number of worms we found in the indicated volume. Abundance is the number of nematodes per 100g of dry soil (calculated from N, wet weight, and dry weight). The salinity, ORP in columns R and S were extrapolated from the sample itself (see details in methods). The units from mass spec data are in mg per kg are ppm (1kg = 1 million mg). For Na for instance, the ...