Editorial: diversity of marine meiofauna on the coast of Brazil

Abstract

After a first bout of primarily taxonomical effort, meiofauna studies in Brazilian waters remained virtually neglected until the 1990s. At the end of the last century, taxonomical and ecological studies on meiofauna taxa were again published regularly, especially for Nematoda and Copepoda. In this issue, 18 new species are described and ten species are redescribed from seven Phyla. The five ecological articles cover the spatial distribution of forams and amoeba in a lagunar system, the meiofauna associated with biogenic structures, the relationship between nematodes and granulometry, and the response of sandy-beach meiofauna to a natural, short-term pulse of diatoms. All these contributions show the potential of the Brazilian coast for revealing new species and testing small to large-scale hypotheses about ecological processes.