Shrews (Soricidae, Eulipotyphla) from the Russian Far East and Siberia: Combination and search for congruence of molecular genetic and morphological data

Abstract

The distance joining (DJ) method has been used to combine morphological and molecular genetic (cytb) data on 19 species of Siberian and Far Eastern shrews. It has been found that morphological distances between the species do not correspond to molecular genetic distances (Mantel’s test, r = 0.336) due to the size component of morphological variation. Data on the relationships between taxa of generic and species levels according to the molecular marker (cytb) are incongruent to those based on morphometric characters of the Soricidae, since the cytb gene is a recorder of neutral mutations, whereas the size of morphological characters is a reflection of adaptive evolution. The correlation between the two types of data has noticeably increased (r = 0.799) after the size component was excluded from the morphological distance matrix. The combination of morphological and molecular distance matrices with subsequent nonmetric two-dimensional scaling and dendrogram construction has provided a basis for conclusions about the generic and sub-generic structure of the family Soricidae, which basically correspond to current views on the taxonomy of this group, and for hypotheses concerning the taxonomic status of S. mirabilis and S. minutissimus.