Abstract
The Japanese eel (Anguilla japonica), European eel (Anguilla anguilla), and American eel (Anguilla rostrata) are migratory, catadromous, temperate zone fish sharing several common life cycle features. The population genetics of panmixia in these eel species has already been investigated. Our extensive population genetics analysis was based on 1400 Gb of whole-genome sequence (WGS) data from 84 eels. It demonstrated that a Japanese eel group from the Kuma River differed from other populations of the same species. Even after removing the potential adapted/selected single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) data, and with very small differences (fixation index [Fst] = 0.01), we obtained results consistently indicating that panmixia does not occur in Japanese eels. The life cycle of the Japanese eel is well-established and the Kuma River is in the center of its habitat. Nevertheless, simple reproductive isolation is not the probable cause of non-panmixia in this species. We propose that the combination of spawning area subdivision, philopatry, and habitat preference/avoidance accounts for the non-panmixia in the Japanese eel population. We named this hypothesis the “reproductive isolation like subset mapping” (RISM) model. This finding may be indicative of the initial stages of sympatric speciation in these eels.
Highlights
IntroductionThe levels of genetic divergence are low in pelagic fishes
The 84 A. japonica samples analyzed in the present study originated from seven sites across Japanese eel of the Takase (Japan), Taiwan, and the West Mariana Ridge (Figure 1 and Table S1)
The results showed that the 84 eels analyzed had diverged from the 18 other Anguilla species and subspecies and formed a cluster with A. japonica AB038556 [24]
Summary
The levels of genetic divergence are low in pelagic fishes They inhabit freshwater and brackish water during their long development, the European eel (Anguilla anguilla) and American eel (Anguilla rostrata) are considered open-ocean fish because their oceanic spawning areas are narrow and their migration routes are long [1,2]. Extensive single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) analyses and population genetics studies demonstrated panmixia in European eels [3,6]. Population studies of American eels indicated that they are panmictic [7,8]. Based on these recent results, North Atlantic eels have been regarded as a classic example of a panmictic species
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