One species for one island? Unexpected diversity and weak connectivity in a widely distributed tropical hydrozoan.
Isolation by distance (IBD) is one of the main modes of differentiation in marine species, above all in species presenting low dispersal capacities. This study reports the genetic structuring in the tropical hydrozoan Lytocarpia brevirostris α (sensu Postaire et al, 2016b), a brooding species, from 13 populations in the Western Indian Ocean (WIO) and one from New Caledonia (Tropical Southwestern Pacific). At the local scale, populations rely on asexual propagation at short distance, which was not found at larger scales; identical genotypes were restricted to single populations. After the removal of repeated genotypes, all populations presented significant positive FISvalues (between 0.094*** and 0.335***). Gene flow was extremely low at all spatial scales, between sites within islands (<10 km distance) and among islands (100 to>11 000 km distance), with significant pairwise FSTvalues (between 0.012*** and 0.560***). A general pattern of IBD was found at the Indo-Pacific scale, but also within sampled ecoregions of the WIO province. Clustering analyses identified each sampled island as an independent population, whereas analysis of molecular variance indicated that population genetic differentiation was significant at small (within island) and intermediate (among islands within province) spatial scales. The high population differentiation might reflect the life cycle of this brooding hydrozoan, possibly preventing regular dispersal at distances more than a few kilometres and probably leading to high cryptic diversity, each island housing an independent evolutionary lineage.
Université de La Réunion, UMR ENTROPIE Université de La Réunion-CNRS-IRD, Saint Denis, France.|Laboratoire d'Excellence CORAIL, Perpignan, France.
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0000-0001-8566-1040
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Postaire
Université de La Réunion, UMR ENTROPIE Université de La Réunion-CNRS-IRD, Saint Denis, France.|Laboratoire d'Excellence CORAIL, Perpignan, France.
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P
Gélin
Université de La Réunion, UMR ENTROPIE Université de La Réunion-CNRS-IRD, Saint Denis, France.|Laboratoire d'Excellence CORAIL, Perpignan, France.
J H
JH
Bruggemann
Université de La Réunion, UMR ENTROPIE Université de La Réunion-CNRS-IRD, Saint Denis, France.|Laboratoire d'Excellence CORAIL, Perpignan, France.
H
H
Magalon
D000818:Animals; D051456:Gene Flow; D005828:Genetics, Population; D005838:Genotype; D037402:Hydrozoa / Q000235:genetics*; D019156:Indian Ocean; D062312:Islands; D018895:Microsatellite Repeats; D014329:Tropical Climate