Abstract
Lumbricidae earthworms dominate agricultural lands and often natural terrestrial ecosystems in temperate regions in Europe. They impact soil properties and nutrient cycling, shaping plant community composition and aboveground food webs. The simplicity of the earthworm body plan has hampered morphology-based classifications and taxonomy; hence current research on Lumbricidae systematic relies mostly on molecular data from multiple or single locus [e.g., cytochrome oxidase subunit I (COI) barcodes] to infer evolutionary relationships, validate taxonomic groups and/or identify species. Here we use multiple nuclear and mitochondrial gene regions (including COI) to generate updated maximum likelihood and Bayesian phylogenies of the family Lumbricidae. We then compare these trees to new COI trees to assess the performance of COI at inferring lumbricid inter-generic relationships.
Highlights
Lumbricidae earthworms account for 90% of the invertebrate biomass in temperate soils [1]
maximum likelihood (ML) and Bayesian trees Figure 1 for cytochrome oxidase subunit I (COI) and ALLgenes showed minor topological differences between phylogenies of the same dataset, but no inconsistency was detected between them
COI and ALLgenes ML and Bayesian trees were significantly different between datasets (P
Summary
Lumbricidae earthworms account for 90% of the invertebrate biomass in temperate soils [1]. They exert a large impact on soil physical, chemical and biological properties and play a major role in animal food webs and plant composition [2]. Lumbricids comprises ~300 known species, its taxonomy and classification has been hindered by the structural simplicity of the earthworm body plan [5,6]. Relatively recently earthworm specialists have begun to use molecular information and phylogenetic tools to validate and update Lumbricidae systematics. Phylogenetic analysis of DNA sequences has already proven useful to solve taxonomic questions within several lumbricid genera (e.g., Eisenia [7], Aporrectodea [5,8] and Postandrilus [9])
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