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Publication
Northern refugia and recent expansion in the North Sea: The case of the wrasse Symphodus melops (Linnaeus, 1758)
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Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
Pleistocene climate changes have imposed extreme conditions to intertidal rocky
marine communities, forcing many species to significant range shifts in their geographical
distributions. Phylogeographic analyses based on both mitochondrial
and nuclear genetic markers provide a useful approach to unravel phylogeographic
patterns and processes of species after this time period, to gain general knowledge
of how climatic changes affect shifts in species distributions.We analyzed these patterns
on the corkwing wrasse (Symphodus melops, Labridae), a rocky shore species
inhabiting North Sea waters and temperate northeastern Atlantic Ocean from Norway
toMorocco including theAzores, using a fragment of the mitochondrial control
region and the first intron of the nuclear S7 ribosomal protein gene.We found that
S. melops shows a clear differentiation between the Atlantic and the Scandinavian
populations and a sharp contrast in the genetic diversity, high in the south and
low in the north. Within each of these main geographic areas there is little or no
genetic differentiation. The species may have persisted throughout the last glacial
maximum in the southern areas as paleotemperatures were not lower than they are
today in North Scandinavia. The North Sea recolonization most likely took place
during the current interglacial and is dominated by a haplotype absent from the
south of the study area, but present in Plymouth and Belfast. The possibility of a
glacial refugium in or near the English Channel is discussed.
Description
Keywords
Atlantic coast Glacial refugia Labridae North sea Phylogeography Spatial variation of genetic diversity
Citation
Ecology and Evolution, 2 (1), 153-164