Abstract
Evidence available for most inland water and terrestrial organisms highlights the significant role played by southern Italy, Sicily and the Maltese islands as refuges during Pleistocene climatic fluctuations. However, to date, the hypothesis that these areas may have acted as Pleistocene refugia for the freshwater crab Potamon fluviatile has not been explicitly tested, and a recent origin of local P. fluviatile populations was proposed on the basis of a small set of analysed molecular data. We have thus expanded the currently available data set on the population genetic structure of P. fluviatile through dedicated samplings in Sicily (Italy, 18 specimens), the Maltese Islands (Malta, 15 specimens) and the island of Corfu (Greece, seven specimens), with the explicit aim of testing the role of southern Italy, Sicily and the Maltese archipelago as refugia where early Pleistocene or pre-Quaternary populations of the freshwater crab could have persisted to date. Based on the analysis of both novel and published cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COI) sequence data, we gathered evidence supporting a recent origin of the southern Italian, Sicilian and Maltese populations of Potamon fluviatile from the Balkans, thus rejecting the hypothesised Pleistocene persistence in the area of pre-existing local populations of the same species.
Highlights
The freshwater crab family Potamidae is classified into two subfamilies: Potaminae and Potamiscinae (Eastern and South-eastearn Asia) (Yeo & Ng 2003)
The haplotype diversity values observed for the three geographical groups indicate the occurrence of a highly significant differentiation for the pairs “Balkans vs. Central Italy” and “ISM vs. Central Italy”; no significant difference was scored for the pair “Balkans vs. ISM”
The performed analyses show that the studied Potamon fluviatile populations are not geographically structured, and that the highest haplotype diversity is present in the Balkan area, despite the relatively low number of samples studied from this region
Summary
The freshwater crab family Potamidae is classified into two subfamilies: Potaminae (distributed across Europe, North Africa, Yemen, the Middle East and India) and Potamiscinae (Eastern and South-eastearn Asia) (Yeo & Ng 2003). A revision of the genus Potamon Savigny, 1816 in the West-Palearctic region lists 16 species, divided into four mostly allopatric or parapatric subgenera that were distinguished through morphological characters, mostly related to the gonopods (Brandis et al 2000). Since 2008, P. fluviatile has been assessed as “Near threatened” on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species (http:// www.iucnredlist.org/details/134293/0), because the populations of the species historically declined as a result of pollution, over-harvesting and mismanagement of habitats (Matthew & Reynolds 1995; Gherardi & Holdich 1999)
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