Abstract
Geoemydid turtles are one of the most imperilled fauna on the planet, with nearly half of them are threatened with extinction due to bushmeat crisis, traditional medicine, and the illegal pet trade. Classical taxonomy often fails to identify the pet-kept turtle specimens due to amorphous form, unusual shell colouration owing to poor storage in captivity or intensely tinted for high demanding value. The DNA barcoding technique has evidenced as a supportive tool for accurate species identification in systematics research and discerned the nameless taxa in forensic sciences. We tested the effectiveness of DNA barcoding tools for identifying the pet-kept Geoemydid turtle in northeast India. The 36 generated sequences are readily delineated into 12 Geoemydid species using molecular data. The overall mean genetic distance of the studied Geoemydid turtles dataset is 15.3% and ranges from 3.4% to 22.6% between the species. The NJ, ML and Bayesian phylogeny also resulted monophyletic clustering and discriminated all the studied species. The present study contributes DNA barcode sequences of Geoemydid turtles in the global database and also affirms the on-going illegal pet trade of highly threatened species in northeast India.
Highlights
Geoemydid turtles are one of the most ornamental and highly threatened Chelonian groups in the world (van Dijk et al 2000; Buhlmann et al 2009)
The family Geoemydidae comprises of 71 species within 19 genera and two subfamilies worldwide (Turtle Taxonomy Working Group 2017)
The pet turtles are generally kept alive inside the small artificial water tank, barrel or aquarium without proper management and the shells are often intensely tinted by colours or chemicals for recreation purposes or high demanding commercial value
Summary
Geoemydid turtles are one of the most ornamental and highly threatened Chelonian groups in the world (van Dijk et al 2000; Buhlmann et al 2009). Several baseline studies have been fulfilled to know the morphology, genetic information, and distribution pattern of wild living Geoemydid turtles in northeast India (Das 2001; Praschag et al 2007; Kundu et al 2016). The generated DNA data would enrich the global database as well as helps to identify Geoemydid species and track the illegal turtle trade hereafter.
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