Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge the crew and pilots of the R/V Western
Flyer and ROV Doc Ricketts, R/V Rachel Carson andROV Ventana for their help with collecting these delicate
specimens and assistance with blue-water diving. We would like to thank
Warren Francis for generating many of our transcriptome data and for
providing helpful comments on the manuscript. April Woods and Maile
Prickett were instrumental in PCR and sequencing help, and we thank Kyra
Schlining and Susan Von Thun for support at sea. We would also like to
thank Jacob Winnikoff who created some of the silhouettes for figure 2,
helped collect specimens, and for his constructive comments on the
manuscript. Numerous specimens were donated by Bruce Robison, Rob
Sherlock, Kristine Walz, David Clague, Lonny Lundsten, William Browne,
Stacy Kim, Keith Bayha, Larry Madin, Wyatt Patry (Monterey Bay
Aquarium), California Academy of the Sciences, and Ocean Genome Legacy
Center to increase our sampling breadth. We also graciously acknowledge
Katie Pitz, who provided ctenophore sequences from her metabarcoding
library. This work was funded by the David and Lucile Packard
Foundation, the National Science Foundation (NSF-DEB 1542679 to SHDH)
and the National Institutes of Health (R01-GM087198).