DNA barcoding of Jamaican bats: implications to Neotropical biodiversity

Abstract

We report on the first comprehensive DNA barcoding survey of bats from Jamaica and compare the genetic variation to similar species on South America and Central America. Bats comprise the majority of mammalian diversity in typical lowland forest in the Neotropics, but the Caribbean is one noticeable geographic gap in the International Barcode of Life reference database. Of the 20 known species reported from Jamaica, half were DNA barcoded and were genetically distinct with interspecific variation ranging from 17 to 33%. By contrast, intraspecific variation ranged from 0 to 0.5% indicating that the barcode gap was sufficient in differentiating bat species diversity in Jamaica. The low levels of intraspecific divergence indicate that the populations within each species are relatively homogeneous across the island. There were, however, several cases of high sequence divergence for widely distributed species that occur on both the Caribbean islands and the continental mainland, which warrant further taxonomic study.