Abstract
The distribution of the intertidal barnacle Chthamalus montagui spans the West Mediterranean Sea and the Northeast Atlantic shores of Europe and West Africa. Knowledge of the phylogeography of this species has been limited to the Mediterranean and the European shores of the Atlantic. The present study considers the populations of West Europe, but also focuses on the overlooked populations of West Africa. We performed a molecular analysis using two markers: the mitochondrial COI gene and the nuclear rRNA ITS gene. Whereas ITS proved to be non-informative, COI has demonstrated that the East Atlantic population of C. montagui comprises two genetically distinct clades: a northern clade that ranges from Mauritania to Scotland and a southern clade that comprises the populations from Senegal. These clades are separated by the Cape Verde Front, which stretches west of the upwelling area off Mauritania. We consider these clades as two cryptic species of the nominal species C. montagui.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 654-661 |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| Journal | Zoologica Scripta |
| Volume | 52 |
| Issue number | 6 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Nov 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2023 The Authors. Zoologica Scripta published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Funding
We thank Dr. Yaakov Langzam of the Electron Microscopy Unit, Institute for Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials (BINA), Bar-Ilan University, for help in preparing the SEM and light microscopy figures. We thank Yael Laure of the Mina & Everard Goodman Faculty of Life Sciences, Bar-Ilan University, for editing and improving this manuscript.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Yael Laure of the Mina & Everard Goodman Faculty of Life Sciences | |
| Bar-Ilan University |
Keywords
- Cape Verde Front
- Chthamalus montagui
- Mauritania
- Senegal
- cryptic species
- upwelling