Phylogeography of the Brittle Star Ophiura sarsii Lütken, 1855 (Echinodermata: Ophiuroidea) from the Barents Sea and East Atlantic

Evgeny Genelt-Yanovskiy,Ekaterina Stratanenko,Natalia Strelkova,Sophia Nazarova,Natalia Zhuravleva,Qinzeng Xu,Yixuan Li

doi:10.3390/d13020040

Evgeny Genelt-Yanovskiy, Ekaterina Stratanenko + Show 5 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/d13020040

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Abstract

Ophiura sarsii is a common brittle star species across the Arctic and Sub-Arctic regions of the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans. Ophiurasarsii is among the dominant echinoderms in the Barents Sea. We studied the genetic diversity of O.sarsii by sequencing the 548 bp fragment of the mitochondrial COI gene. Ophiurasarsii demonstrated high genetic diversity in the Barents Sea. Both major Atlantic mtDNA lineages were present in the Barents Sea and were evenly distributed between the northern waters around Svalbard archipelago and the southern part near Murmansk coast of Kola Peninsula. Both regions, and other parts of the O.sarsii range, were characterized by high haplotype diversity with a significant number of private haplotypes being mostly satellites to the two dominant haplotypes, each belonging to a different mtDNA clade. Demographic analyses indicated that the demographic and spatial expansion of O.sarsii in the Barents Sea most plausibly has started in the Bølling–Allerød interstadial during the deglaciation of the western margin of the Barents Sea.

Highlights

Marine communities of the Northern Atlantic experienced remarkable changes during the quaternary sea level oscillations when ranges of species were contracting during the advances of glaciations and expanding during warmer periods [1]
The total aligned c oxidase subunit I (COI) data set consisted of 548 nucleotide positions for 77 Ophiura sarsii sequences, including 53 newly obtained sequences from the Barents Sea and 24 earlier published sequences deposited in GenBank [24,25,26] (Table 1)
Our study revealed two major mitochondrial lineages in Atlantic O. sarsii, while no clear population structure was found across East Atlantic

Summary

Introduction

Marine communities of the Northern Atlantic experienced remarkable changes during the quaternary sea level oscillations when ranges of species were contracting during the advances of glaciations and expanding during warmer periods [1]. Southern and central parts of the Barents Sea are characterized by higher abundance and biomass of benthic species compared to the northern regions around Svalbard and Franz glacial cycles and after the retreat of the LGM ice sheets resulted in secondary contacts between previously isolated populations [6]. Ophiura sarsii is a predator–scavenger species, 4% of the total echinoderm biomass, typically occurring at muddy and muddy fine sand and an important food item many fish species. The genetic structure of O. sarsii was broadly evaluated across the Pacific of population structuring across the Atlantic using the previously published sequences [23]. Gene to examine the genetic diversity of O. sarsii in the Barents Sea and to make a pilot estimate of population structuring across the Atlantic using the previously published. Materials and Methods sequences from the barcoding studies of Echinoderms [24,25,26]

Samples

Molecular Analysis

Results

Discussion

Methods