020 Single Source Determination-SAP_ Curation Services_red_Redacted.pdf

4. Supporting rationale. Only one source or brand name is reasonably available as detailed below:

X Other - Only one source is capable – We are in need of highly technical expertise to identify and describe invertebrate species from North Pacific waters collected on our bottom trawl surveys in Alaskan waters.

Expert familiarity with the invertebrate species of this region is necessary to perform the services and NOAA does not possess the expertise required to adequately complete this task. Furthermore, NOAA does not have the resources to accession, curate, or make collected specimens available to researchers around the world.

The Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) Benthic Invertebrate Collection (SIO-BIC) houses more than 86,000 curated lots, representing over one million individual specimens from global marine environments, making it one of the largest and most taxonomically comprehensive marine invertebrate collections in the United States. These holdings span over 9,000 species, including 700+ type lots and more than 120 holotypes, providing essential comparative material for accurate species-level identifications. SIO-BIC collections encompass a wide geographic and ecological range, including the eastern North Pacific, deep-sea habitats, chemosynthetic ecosystems (hydrothermal vents, seeps, whale falls), polar regions, and extensive historical expeditions. This breadth is directly relevant to NOAA’s Alaska bottom trawl surveys, which routinely encounter deep-sea and poorly described benthic invertebrate taxa that require comparison to expertly curated reference material.

SIO-BIC also maintains ethanol-preserved specimens suitable for DNA and genomic analyses, enabling both traditional morphological taxonomy and modern molecular approaches. The collection includes numerous historical NOAA-related deep-sea samples integrated over several decades, and SIO has a demonstrated institutional capacity to curate, organize, and rescue large scientific collections from other marine research programs as researchers retire. The collection is actively used by visiting scientists and is linked to global biodiversity data platforms via digitization projects, ensuring broad accessibility for future comparative work.

Scripps’ taxonomic and curatorial expertise spans a wide range of benthic invertebrate taxa of direct relevance to this contract, including annelids, crustaceans, mollusks, echinoderms, and cnidarians. The SIO-BIC team includes internationally recognized experts and research staff engaged in systematics, biodiversity surveys, deep-sea ecology, biogeography, and species-description research. Current and historical SIO faculty and curators have described numerous new species and families across these groups and maintain active research programs in global phylogenetics, invertebrate morphology, and marine biodiversity. Multiple trained assistants and collection specialists with broad marine invertebrate expertise are also available to process and curate specimens under rigorous museum standards.

Furthermore, SIO’s robust curation, digitization infrastructure, and global integration of specimen metadata ensure that NOAA’s invertebrate holdings will be archived in a manner that maximizes accessibility, scientific value, and long-term preservation.

For these reasons, Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s Benthic Invertebrate Collection represents a uniquely qualified and unmatched resource for the identification, verification, and curation of benthic invertebrates collected from NOAA’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center bottom trawl surveys.