Abstract
Current taxonomic treatments of New Zealand and temperate Australian members of the gastropod subfamily Cantharidinae imply that species on either side of the Tasman Sea are closely related and, in some cases, congeneric. Such a close relationship, however, entails a relatively recent divergence of Australian and New Zealand lineages, which seems inconsistent with what is known about cantharidine larval development in general. In order to address these issues, mitochondrial and nuclear DNA sequences were used to ascertain how cantharidine genera became established over the wide geographical range of temperate Australia and New Zealand, including their subantarctic islands. Our robust and dated phylogenies (based on 16S, COI, 12S and 28S sequences) revealed that Australian and New Zealand species fall into endemic clades that have been separated for, at most, 35million years. This divergence date postdates a vicariant split by around 50million years and we suggest that, once again, long-distance trans-Tasman dispersal has played a pivotal role in molluscan evolution in this part of the world. Our results also show that the current classification requires revision. We recognize three genera (Cantharidus [comprising 2 subgenera: Cantharidus s.str. and Pseudomargarella n. subgen.], Micrelenchus [comprising 2 subgenera: Micrelenchus s.str. and Mawhero] and Roseaplagis n. gen.) for New Zealand cantharidine species. In our dated BEAST tree, these genera form a clade with the endemic Australian Prothalotia and South African Oxystele. Other temperate Australian cantharidines in our study fall into previously recognized genera (Phasianotrochus, Thalotia, Calthalotia), which are all quite distinct from Cantharidus in spite of some authors considering various of them to be possible synonyms. Finally, we remove the Australian genus Cantharidella from the Cantharidinae to the subfamily Trochinae and erect a new genus, Cratidentium n. gen., also in the Trochinae, to accommodate several Australian species previously considered to belong to Cantharidella.
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