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Diversity and biogeography of larval and juvenile notothenioid fishes in McMurdo Sound, Antarctica

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Abstract

Antarctic notothenioid fish larvae and juveniles are pelagic and subject to oceanic transport, influencing species distribution and biogeography. The nature of notothenioid larval/juvenile diversity in the high-latitude McMurdo Sound is virtually unknown to-date. We report here a first assessment of this diversity and its contribution to species richness in the Sound. We collected 151 larvae and juveniles from under ice cover. To overcome uncertainties in identifying larvae by morphology, we used full-length mitochondrial ND2 gene sequences in phylogenetic reconstruction with reference adults and identified 13 species representing four families. Six are nototheniids whose adults are common in the Sound, and a seventh is a cryptic nototheniid that is likely Pagothenia brachysoma, previously unknown to the Sound. The rest included four icefishes, an artedidraconid, and a bathydraconid, all without prior adult record in the Sound. With seven of 13 species previously undocumented, larval/juvenile notothenioid diversity appears to double adult diversity. Published fish surveys show adults of these icefishes and the artedidraconid occur in the nearby Terra Nova Bay and/or western Ross Sea; thus, their pelagic larvae and juveniles could be transported by the Ross Sea circulation into the Sound. The bathydraconid, identified as Psilodraco breviceps, is reportedly endemic to S. Georgia. We found additional unpublished barcode sequences for specimens from the Dumont d’Urville Sea and Ross Sea, and they form a species clade with the McMurdo larval and Marguerite Bay adult P. breviceps in this study, indicating this species has a circumpolar distribution.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank K. Hoefling, P. A. Cziko, and L. G. Fields for their efforts in catching larval and juvenile specimens by diving, as well as in photographing them for this study. Additional thanks to D. Downie for his participation on some of the PCR and DNA sequencing reactions. We thank J. J. Torres for the gift of the Marguerite Bay adult P. breviceps used in this study. This work was funded by the US National Science Foundation Division of Polar Programs grant ANT-1142158 to C.-H. C. Cheng and A. L. DeVries, and by the Herbert Holdsworth Ross Memorial Fund from the Illinois Natural History Survey to K. R. Murphy.

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  1. Department of Animal Biology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 515 Morrill Hall, 505 S Goodwin Ave, Urbana, IL, 61801, USA

    Katherine R. Murphy, Elizabeth A. Kalmanek & C.-H. Christina Cheng

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  1. Katherine R. Murphy
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  2. Elizabeth A. Kalmanek
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  3. C.-H. Christina Cheng
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Correspondence to C.-H. Christina Cheng.

Electronic supplementary material

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Online Resource 1

List of GenBank accession numbers and BOLD sequence IDs for reference sequences used in this study (DOCX 26 kb)

Online Resource 2

Full topology trees from both Maximum Likelihood and Bayesian analyses of ND2 sequences (PDF 8127 kb)

Online Resource 3

Alignment of partial COI and full length Rho sequences of putative McMurdo Sound larval P. breviceps and vouchered adult from Marguerite Bay, W. Antarctic Peninsula (DOCX 15 kb)

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Murphy, K.R., Kalmanek, E.A. & Cheng, CH.C. Diversity and biogeography of larval and juvenile notothenioid fishes in McMurdo Sound, Antarctica. Polar Biol 40, 161–176 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00300-016-1939-5

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