Population Genetics Demonstrates Persistence of Lined Seahorse in Western Mid-Atlantic Ocean

In a finding vital to effective species management, a team including City College of New York (CCNY) biologists has determined that the lined seahorse (Hippocampus erectus) is more a permanent resident of the western mid-Atlantic Ocean than a vagrant. The fish is commonly found in three western Atlantic zoogeographic provinces, although inhabitants of the temperate northern Virginia Province are often considered tropical vagrants that arrive during warm seasons from the southern provinces and perish as temperatures decline. Researchers including Ph.D. student J.T. Boehm and Dr. Michael Hickerson of CCNY decided to test the alternative hypotheses of historical persistence versus the ephemerality of a northern Virginia Province population. They used a dataset consisting of 11,708 randomly sampled spots from the genomes of individuals collected from the eastern Gulf of Mexico to Long Island, New York. "Concordant results from genomic analyses all infer three genetically divergent subpopulations, and strongly support Virginia Province inhabitants as a genetically diverged and a historically persistent ancestral gene pool," said Mr. Boehm. The results suggested that individuals that emerge in coastal areas during the warm season can be considered "local" and support offshore migration during the colder months. "This research demonstrates how a large number of genes sampled across a geographical range can capture the diversity of coalescent histories (across loci) while inferring population history," said Dr. Hickerson. "Moreover, these results clearly demonstrate the utility of population genomic data to infer peripheral subpopulation persistence in difficult-to-observe species." The study was published online on January 28, 2015 in an article in the open-access journal PLOS ONE. The image shows a lined seahorse (Hippocampus erectus).
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