Exact species identification underpins accurate biodiversity estimates, effective management of sustainably exploited, protected or endangered species up to assisting in bio-discovery and elucidating biological introductions and symbiosis relationships. Melody in her recently accepted paper makes use of COI barcoding to identify 65 taxa of flatheads across the Indo-West Pacific out of 48 currently accepted morpho-species. During this exercise we had the opportunity to appreciate the performance of the Automatic Barcode Gap Discovery species delineation tool (ABGD) developed by Puillandre and co-authors and implemented at the online ABGD species delineation tool: http://wwwabi.snv.jussieu.fr/public/abgd.
M. Puckridge, N. Andreakis, S.A. Appleyard & R.D. Ward (2012) Cryptic diversity in flathead fishes (Scorpaeniformes: Platycephalidae) across the Indo-West Pacific uncovered by DNA barcoding. Molecular Ecology Resources (in press)
abstract: Identification of taxonomical units underpins most biological endeavours ranging from accurate biodiversity estimates to the effective management of sustainably harvested, protected or endangered species. Successful species identification is now frequently based on a combination of approaches including morphometrics and DNA markers. Sequencing of the mitochondrial COI gene is an established methodology with an international campaign directed at barcoding all fishes. We employed COI sequencing alongside traditional taxonomic identification methods and uncovered instances of deep intraspecific genetic divergences among flathead species. Sixty-five operational taxonomic units (OTUs) were observed across the Indo-West Pacific from just 48 currently recognized species. The most comprehensively sampled taxon, Platycephalus indicus, exhibited the highest levels of genetic diversity with eight lineages separated by up to 16.37% genetic distance. Our results clearly indicate a thorough reappraisal of the current taxonomy of P. indicus (and its three junior synonyms) is warranted in conjunction with detailed taxonomic work on the other additional Platycephalidae OTUs detected by DNA barcoding.
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