Molecular Evolution on Anemonefish Phylogeny
Date Issued
2009
Date
2009
Author(s)
Lin, Chia-Ni
Abstract
Anemonefish live in tropical coral reefs or shallow lagoons of the Pacific Ocean and Indian Ocean. Anemonefish are fish from the subfamily Amphiprioninae in the family Pomacentridae. Anemonefish, namely Amphiprion, are presently subdivided into the 29 species. Because of the diversity of their body colour patterns, they are quite common and popular, not only in the field of underwater photography, but also in the seawater ornamental fish trade.he traditional fish taxonomy is mainly based on a wide range of traits, say shapes, habitats, life histories, and other biological characteristics, as the basic input for species delimitation analysis. However, these traits are not always stable during their life cycle, and are possibly variable within the same species. Many coral reef fish species are identified according to their colour patterns. However, recent molecular genetic studies have shown that the colour pattem is not appropriate for use as the morphological marker for the investigation of population genetic isolation or species boundaries. The genus Amphiprion comprises several species that have very similar colours. Additionally, morphological characters are often variable and the colour types could be very different in different geographical locations, and sometimes sibling species share a considerable overlap of morphological characters. Therefore, to classify or identify anemonefish had made the taxonomist greatly perplexed.n this research, we studied 24 out of 29 anemonefish species by analysing cytochrome b (Cyt b) gene sequences, so as to reconstruct their phylogenetic tree through Maximum Likelihood (ML) and Neighbor Joining (NJ) methods. The results support how there should be a monophyletic origin for the subfamily Amphiprioninae, and that there are three distinct genetic groups within anemonefish species according to both the molecular and morphological evidences, but also that the two genuses, Amphiprion and Premnas, belong to the monophyletic group. Moreover, we create an identification key, combining the information of phylogenetic tree and morphological characters, which could be regarded as a reference for the anemonefish studies in the future.
Subjects
anemonefish
clownfish
Phylogeny
identification key
Cytochrome b
File(s)![Thumbnail Image]()
Loading...
Name
ntu-98-R96b45007-1.pdf
Size
23.32 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum
(MD5):6b1bc4753090473b7fc3b6e13467cac4