DNA Barcoding Reveals High Cryptic Diversity in the North Eurasian Moina Species (Crustacea: Cladocera)

Abstract

Species of the genus Moina Baird (Cladocera: Moinidae) often dominate freshwater crustacean communities in temporary water bodies. Several species of Moina are used as food for fish larvae in aquaculture, as bioindicators in toxicological studies, and as common subjects for physiological studies. The aim of this paper is to estimate biodiversity of Moina in northern Eurasia using the standard DNA barcoding approach based on the cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COI) gene. We analysed 160 newly obtained and 157 existing COI sequences, and found evidence for 21 phylogroups of Moina, some of which were detected here for the first time. Our study confirmed the opinion that the actual species diversity of cladocerans is several times higher than is presently accepted. Our results also indicated that Moina has the second richest species diversity among the cladoceran genera (with only Daphnia O. F. Mueller having a greater diversity of species). Our study strongly supports division of Moina into two faunistic groups: European-Western Siberian and Eastern Siberian-Far Eastern, with a transitional zone at the Yenisey River basin (Eastern Siberia). Here, we refrain from taxonomic descriptions of new species, as this requires a thorough morphological and taxonomic study for each putative taxon.

Phylogeography of the Chydorus sphaericus Group (Cladocera: Chydoridae) in the Northern Palearctic

“…Interestingly, the transitional zone between the western A1 and eastern A3 clades occurs at the Yenisey River basin (grey shading in Fig 1). A similar genetic transition zone has been detected for the cladoceran genus Moina [10]. This region of the Palearctic is a candidate for a suture zone [81–82] for the cladoceran taxa, and even for all freshwater fauna.…”

“…The best studied cladocerans belong to the planktonic genus Daphnia [2–4], but a few recent studies have investigated non-planktonic genera [5–10]. Planktonic and littoral cladocerans often differ in their resting egg structure and dispersal strategy.…”

Cladocera and Copepoda (Crustacea: Branchiopoda) of the Lake Bolon and its basin (Far East of Russia)

“…In some other cases, genetic data confirm the conspecificity of populations from Europe and Far East as it is the case of Eurycercus macracanthus, Daphnia sinensis, Moina macrocopa [Bekker et al, 2012[Bekker et al, , 2016Popova et al, 2016] or some clades of P. pediculus [Xu et al, 2009]. Therefore, both the «non-cosmopolitanism" paradigm is not universal and taxonomic status and geographical range of all poorly studied taxa need a revision.…”

“…Also there is evidence of the existence of other North Eurasian cryptic species groups: Diaphanosoma brachyurum s.l. [Korovchinsky, 2004;Korovchinsky, Sheveleva, 2009], Moina micrura [Bekker et al, 2016], Polyphemus pediculus [Xu et al, 2009], and some other taxa.…”

First record of Moina dumonti Kotov, Elías-Gutiérrez & Granado-Ramírez, 2005 (Branchiopoda: Anomopoda) in Brazil

“…According to Forró et al (2008), approximately 60% of the species are endemic to their type localities. Results from genetic analysis also suggest that their diversity is greatly underestimated, at least in Eurasia (Petrusek et al 2004, Bekker et al 2016. To date, Moina dumonti Kotov, Elías-Gutiérrez & GranadoRamirez, 2005 was recorded only at its type locality in Mexico and in Cuba (Kotov et al 2005).…”