Phylogenetic Relationships within the Eared Seals (Otariidae: Carnivora): Implications for the Historical Biogeography of the Family

Mitochondrial control region haplotypes of the South American sea lion Otaria flavescens (Shaw, 1800)

“…These analyses demonstrate the reciprocal monophyly of O. flavescens, with a grouping of haplotypes OFA1-OFA7 being from the Atlantic Ocean population, and specimens from Peru being from the Pacific Ocean group (haplotypes OB4, OB5 and OB2) (8).…”

“…The most common and widespread haplotype, OFA1, was shared by 29 individuals representing 47.54% of the sample, followed by the haplotypes OFA2 (18.3%; N = 11), OFA3 (16.39%; N = 10), OFA4 and OFA5 (3.27%; N = 2), and OFA6 and OFA7 (1.63%; N = 1). These seven haplotypes (OFA1-7) were considered to be new since they are different from the previous haplotypes described for the species by Wynen et al (8). All unique haplotypes were submitted to GenBank (accession Nos.…”

Pinniped phylogenetic relationships inferred using AFLP markers

“…Previous mtDNA and nuclear sequence-based analyses have questioned splitting the Otariidae into fur seals and sea lions (Arnason et al, 2006;Higdon et al, 2007). In mtDNA phylogenies (Wynen et al, 2001;Arnason et al, 2006), C. ursinus is basal to the whole group. We found that although C. ursinus is basal to all other Otariidae using parsimony, the NJ analysis weakly support placing it at the base of all fur seals included in our analyses.…”

“…Pinnipeds have been intensively studied due to their ecological importance as top predators in marine ecosystems and conservation concerns facing many species. Considerable effort has gone into elucidating the phylogeny of this group of mammals using both mtDNA (Wynen et al, 2001;Arnason et al, 2006) and nuclear sequences (Fulton and Strobeck, 2006). Higdon et al's (2007) phylogenetic analysis of the 34 extant pinniped species based on all available GenBank pinniped sequences is, to date, the most comprehensive reported analysis of pinniped species relationships.…”

“…We use AFLP markers to recover both family-and species-level relationships in a mammalian order and compare the resulting phylogeny with published versions based on both mtDNA (Wynen et al, 2001;Arnason et al, 2006) and nuclear (Fulton and Strobeck, 2006) sequences to test the utility of AFLPs for higher-level phylogenetics. At the same time we assess the relative rates of change of the different marker types.…”