Species diversity of freshwater shrimp in Henan Province, China, based
on morphological characters and COI mitochondrial gene
Abstract
Freshwater shrimp is an extremely rich species group with a long and
problematic taxonomic history, attributed to its wide distribution,
numerous species and similar morphology. Shrimp diversity and species
identification is utmost important for fisheries management. However,
identification based on morphological characteristics is difficult and
complex for a non-specialist to perform. The water system of Henan
Province is relatively abundant, but there are few investigations of
freshwater shrimps and no description of molecular features. The aim of
this study was to uncover the species diversity and phylogenetic of
freshwater shrimp in Henan province by combining morphological
identification and molecular species delimitation (barcoding gene: COI
gene). About 1,200 freshwater shrimp samples from 46 sampling sites were
collected for preliminary traditional morphological identification, 222
samples of these were been further microscopic examination and molecular
delimitation. Here we used tree based method (NJ, ML) and distance based
method (ABGD, bPTP) mainly to define species, detect the cryptic species
and assess the validity of the barcoding in molecular. Comprehensive
morphological identification and molecular delimitation results, there
were 9 effective species and more than one cryptic species of freshwater
shrimp in the province and moreover all of them can be identified by DNA
barcoding. The results of morphological identification and molecular
identification show high consistency, which proves the high efficiency
in freshwater shrimp species identification of the DNA barcoding and the
presence of cryptic species.