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We report a dataset of all known and published occurrence records of animals of the phylum Rotifera, including Bdelloidea, Monogononta, and Seisonacea (with the exclusion of Acanthocephala) for Africa and surrounding islands and archipelagos. The dataset includes 24,704 records of 914 taxa (subspecies: 38; species: 783; genus: 76; family: 17), gathered from 610 published papers. The published literature spans from 1854 to 2022, with the highest number of records in the decades 1990-1999 and 2010-2019. The African countries with the highest number of taxa are Nigeria, Algeria, South Africa, and Democratic Republic of the Congo, whereas no records are yet available for a dozen countries. The number of species known from each country can be explained mostly by sampling efforts, measured as the number of papers published for each country up to now. The dataset is available through the Open Science Framework (OSF) and in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). 

We report a dataset of all known and published occurrence records of animals of the phylum Rotifera, including Bdelloidea, Monogononta, and Seisonacea (with the exclusion of Acanthocephala) for Africa and surrounding islands and archipelagos. The dataset includes 27,225 records of 957 taxa (subspecies: 39; species: 819; genus: 81; family: 17; group: 1), gathered from 706 published papers. The published literature spans from 1854 to 2022, with the highest number of records in the decades 1990-1999 and 2010-2019.
230 records of "species inquirendae", "nomina nuda", and "genera inquirenda" found in the published literature were not included in the dataset. Almost 90 % of the data are georeferenced.

The African countries with the highest number of taxa are Nigeria, Algeria, South Africa, and Democratic Republic of the Congo, whereas no records are yet available for a dozen countries. The number of species known from each country can be explained mostly by sampling efforts, measured as the number of papers published for each country up to October 2022.

This detailed literature search increased the number of known rotifer taxa at species, subspecies, form and variety level reported in previous reviews, which were 639 in 1986 (De Ridder, 1986) and 765 (Smolak et al., 2022) in 2022. Of the taxa reported in the current dataset, 167 (18%) are Bdelloidea, 665 (698%) Ploima, 97 (10%) Flosculariaceae, 27 (3%) Collothecacea and one representative of Seisonacea, the marine epizoic rotifer Seison africanus Sørensen, Segers & Funch, 2005 described and recorded only from coastal waters of Kenya (Sørensen et al., 2005).

The data were structured based on the Darwin Core standard (Wieczorek et al., 2012). The dataset is structured to have in each row each record of a rotifer taxon from a sample from Africa and surrounding islands, as cited in the literature. The columns report the original and updated taxon name, additional taxonomic information together with origin of the data and habitat.
All invalid names (i.e. at the level of species inquirenda, nomen nudum, genus inquirendum) were not included in the records uploaded to GBIF. All names were also checked against the backbone of GBIF.

 

The long history of isolation of the Antarctic continent, coupled with the harsh ecological conditions of freezing temperatures, could affect the patterns of genetic diversity in the organisms living there. We aim (a) to test whether such pattern can be seen in a mitochondrial marker of bdelloid rotifers, a group of microscopic aquatic and limno‐terrestrial animals and (b) to speculate on the potential mechanisms driving the pattern.

Focus on Antarctica.

Rotifera Bdelloidea.

We analysed different metrics of genetic diversity, also spatially explicit ones, including number of haplotypes, accumulation curves, genetic distances, time to the most recent common ancestor, number of independently evolving units from DNA taxonomy, strength of the correlation between geographical and genetic distances, population genetics neutrality and differentiation indices, potential historical processes, obtained from an extensive sample of cytochrome oxidase subunit I (COI) sequences obtained from bdelloid rotifers. We included 2242 individuals from 23 species in a comparison between Antarctic and non‐Antarctic taxa, correcting for sample size directly in the analyses and then by confirming the results also using only a restricted dataset of nine well‐sampled species.

Antarctic species had consistently lower genetic diversity and potential younger relative age than non‐Antarctic species, even if they were similar in sample size, geographical extent, neutrality and differentiation indices, and correlation between genetic and geographical distances.

The extensive survey of genetic diversity in one mitochondrial marker in Antarctic bdelloids supports previous suggestions from other organisms that the origin and maintenance of terrestrial Antarctic fauna are different from those of other continents. Such differences could be speculated to be due, in the case of bdelloid rotifers, to the more recent origin of the species living there in comparison to non‐Antarctic species.