Distribution, phylogeny, ecology and conservation of crayfish of the family Astacidae in Montenegro

Abstract

Up to date, about 600 species of freshwater (Decapods) crayfish from Astacida suborders was described in the world. Today, five species of freshwater crayfish from the family Astacidae (Astacus astacus, Astacus leptidactilus, Astacus pachypus, Austropotamobius pallipes and Austropotamobius torrentium) lives in Europe. Besides to autochthonous, now there are allochthonous species living there. They are mainly American species Pacifastacus leniusculus (Dana, 1852) also from the family Astacidae. All three species (A. astacus, A. pallipes and A. torrentium) are protected at European level: listed on IUCN Red List of threatened species (IUCN - International Union for Conservation of Nature) and they are also having been included in Appendix no. III of the Bern Convention by which their exploitation is under strict control and supervision of each state (Taylor, 2002), and type A. torrentium, and A. pallipes are in the Habitats Directive of the European Union. The goal of this dissertation was to analyze the populations of different species of freshwater (Decapods) crayfish from Montenegro in order to obtain information on their distribution, ecology, and to determine the phylogenetic and evolutionary relationships between individuals of species A. torrentium, A. pallipes and A. astacus sampled from Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro as well as their assessment of extinction risk and conservation priorities for biodiversity in aquatic ecosystems. The analysis included physically-chemical parameters of waters where was registered the presence of freshwater (Decapods) crayfish. For each caught crayfish 23 morphometric feature were measured and described by standard descriptive statistics (medium value, min-max value, standard deviation, and coefficient of variation). Same morphometric characteristics have been measured for the species A.astacus from the lake Buser-Serbia and they have also been described by the standard descriptive statistics. The data were then normalized on the way that their value was divided by the corresponding postorbital length (POL = HEL + ARL) and the results related to the morphometric characteristics were taken into account only the normalized input values. For normally distributed data we used the parametric T-test to compare differences of morphometric characters for males and females, and for a small number of samples we have been used Mann-Whitney U test. Variance analysis (ANOVA) was used to establish whether there are statistically important differences between populations of the same species or different species. Considering that there were differences, we worked discriminate analysis (DA). Phylogenetic analysis: Analysis by method of maximum parsimony (MP method) - was conducted by using program PAUP * 4.0b10 (Swoford, 2001). In order to obtain phylogenetic trees, files of gene sequences of 16S rRNA and COI in nexus format were analyzed. Each file was consisted of razing of multiple sequences of individual genes. Statistical analysis of probability of the proposed phylogenetic tree was…