Validity of Pampus liuorum Liu &amp; Li, 2013, Revealed by the DNA Barcoding of Pampus Fishes (Perciformes, Stromateidae)

Jiehong Wei,Jing Liu,Yongshuang Xiao,Renxie Wu,Laith A Jawad,Yajun Wang,Haoran Zhang,Mustafa A Al-Mukhtar

doi:10.3390/d13120618

Abstract

The genus Pampus contains seven valid species, which are commercially important fishery species in the Indo-Pacific area. Due to their highly similar external morphologies, Pampus liuorum has been proposed as a synonym of Pampus cinereus. In this study, partial sequences of COI (582 bp) and Cytb (1077 bp) were presented as potential DNA barcodes of six valid Pampus species and the controversial species P. liuorum. A species delimitation of the seven Pampus species was performed to verify their validities. Explicit COI barcoding gaps were found in all assessed species, except for P. liuorum and P. cinereus, which resulted from their smaller interspecific K2P distance (0.0034–0.0069). A Cytb barcoding gap (0.0200) of the two species was revealed, with a K2P distance ranging from 0.0237 to 0.0277. The longer Cytb fragment is thus a more suitable DNA barcode for the genus Pampus. In the genetic tree, using concatenated Cytb and COI sequences, the seven species reciprocally formed well-supported clades. Species delimitations with ABGD, GMYC, and bPTP models identified seven operational taxonomic units, which were congruent with the seven morphological species. Therefore, all of the seven analyzed species, including P. liuorum, should be kept as valid species.

Highlights

Pomfrets, species of genus Pampus Bonaparte, 1834, family Stromateidae Rafinesque, 1810, are pelagic marine fishes widely distributed along the coast of the Indo-West Pacific region
For c oxidase subunit I (COI) and cytochrome b gene (Cytb), 582 and 1077 bp sequences were retrieved from each specimen collected in this study, respectively; no indel was found in either dataset
Our analyses indicate that the well-identified specimens of P. liuorum, including the paratypes of the species (i.e., IOCAS120541, 0542), are delineated as a single species, which is clearly distinct from P. cinereus and P. candidus (Figure 4)

Summary

Introduction

Species of genus Pampus Bonaparte, 1834, family Stromateidae Rafinesque, 1810, are pelagic marine fishes widely distributed along the coast of the Indo-West Pacific region. Seven valid species of genus Pampus have been recognized, namely, Pampus argenteus (Euphrasen, 1788), P. candidus (Cuvier, 1829), Pampus chinensis (Euphrasen, 1788), Pampus cinereus (Bloch, 1795), Pampus minor Liu & Li, 1998, Pampus nozawae (Ishikawa, 1904), and Pampus punctatissimus (Temminck & Schlegel, 1845) [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]. They contribute high commercial values to fisheries of the countries along the coast of the Indo-West Pacific region. Pampus argenteus might be the most confusing name in the genus

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