Introduction
Vulcanoctopus hydrothermalis, apparently restricted to the hydrothermal vents of the East Pacific Rise, has a morphology stunningly distinct from that of the morphologically conservative octopuses of Muusoctopus. Regardless, the two genera are members of the same clade (Strugnell et al. 2009). The different generic names were retained as they have been argued to be “sufficiently different” to merit it. Vulcanoctopus hydrothermalis prey on swarms of the amphipod Halice hesmonectes that live in warm (2-8°C) water wafting from diffuse vents (Voight 2005). The octopods are also found in ambient seafloor temperatures, as they venture at least 50 m from active vents.
Methods
A single, wild-collected individual was used for this study. The tissue sample was provided by the Field Museum, specimen voucher FMNH 307183. It was collected by the HOV ALVIN on dive 3936 at 10° 46.246’N 103° 39.412’W at 2763 m depth on Nov. 17, 2003.
DNA extraction was performed using the Qiagen DNEasy genomic extraction kit using the standard process. Paired-end sequencing libraries were constructed using the Illumina TruSeq kit according to the manufacturer’s instructions. The libraries were sequenced on an Illumina Hi-Seq platform in paired-end, 2 × 150bp format. The resulting fastq files were trimmed of adapter/primer sequences and low-quality regions with Trimmomatic v0.33 (Bolger et al. 2014). The trimmed sequence was assembled by SPAdes v3.15.4 (Bankevich et al. 2012) followed by a finishing step using Zanfona (Kieras et al. 2021).
Results and Data Availability
Funding
Funding was provided by Iridian Genomes, grant# IRGEN_RG_2021-1345 Genomic Studies of Eukaryotic Taxa.