Abstract
The genus Typhlocirolana includes six species discontinuously distributed in underground freshwater systems throughout southern Mediterranean coasts. The recent discovery of a Sicilian population of Typhlocirolana morphologically close to T. moraguesi from the Balearic Islands raised two issues: the taxonomic status of the Sicilian population and the evolutionary history leading to the present distribution of Typhlocirolana species which are thought to descend from a Cirolana-like marine ancestor. Electrophoretic analysis of eighteen gene loci encoding for enzymes and other proteins revealed a consistently high value of genetic distance ( D=0.815) between the Sicilian sample and the two Majorcan population samples, strongly suggesting their status as separate species. Both genetic distance data and the low levels of heterozygosity detected in all samples suggest a relatively recent age for the Typhlocirolana species so far examined. Results from this study support the hypothesis by Stock according to which Typhlocirolana, as well as other ‘thalassoid’ hypogean Crustaceans, colonized ground-waters in connection with the sedimentary cycles of the Mediterranean coastal lines during the Upper Miocene or Lower Pliocene.
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