Poecilia vivipara Bloch & Schneider, 1801 (Cyprinodontiformes, Poeciliidae), a guppy in an oceanic archipelago: from where did it come?

Abstract

Poecilia vivipara, a small euryhaline guppy is reported at the Maceió River micro-basin in the Fernando de Noronha oceanic archipelago, northeast Brazil. However, the origin (human-mediated or natural dispersal) of this insular population is still controversial. The present study investigates how this population is phylogenetically related to the surrounding continental populations using the cytochrome oxidase I mitochondrial gene from eleven river basins in South America. Our phylogenetic reconstruction showed a clear geographical distribution arrangement of P. vivipara lineages. The Fernando de Noronha haplotype fell within the 'north' clade, closely related to a shared haplotype between the Paraíba do Norte and Potengi basins; the geographically closest continental drainages. Our phylogenetic reconstruction also showed highly divergent lineages, suggesting that P. vivipara may represent a species complex along its wide distribution. Regarding to the insular population, P. vivipara may have been intentionally introduced to the archipelago for the purpose of mosquito larvae control during the occupation of a U.S. military base following World War II. However, given the euryhaline capacity of P. vivipara, a potential scenario of natural (passive or active) dispersal cannot be ruled out.

Histological and Behavioral Toxicity of Tributyltin in the Tropical Guppy Poecilia vivipara

“…However, although histopathological or behavioral effects of tributyltin have been investigated in studies with juvenile or adult fish, these methods have rarely been applied together to fish early life stages, especially for tropical estuarine fish (Fent 1998; Berto‐Júnior et al 2018). The guppy Poecilia vivipara is widely distributed in South America, from Venezuela to Uruguay, and all along the Brazilian coast (Berbel‐Filho et al 2018). At juvenile and adult stages, P. vivipara has become an important ecotoxicological model used to study molecular effects of sewage (Piazza et al 2019), biochemical effects of the antifouling fungicide chlorothalonil (Lopes et al 2020), and phenanthrene bioconcentration and behavioral toxicity (Torreiro‐Melo et al 2015).…”