Etheostoma blennioides phylogeny

Hello All,
Attached is a PDF of a recent paper by Kyle Piller and colleagues on the phylogeny of E. blennioides. There are some nice range maps. Enjoy!

Wow, thats awesome, thanks for the PDF, much appreciated.

Blake

Okay, I'm not certain I understand this. How can E. b. newmanii from the TN River be more closely related to E. blennius than to E. b. newmanii from the Cumberland River?

The position of E. blennius in the mitochondrial DNA phylogeny is probably the result of introgression (transfer of genetic material between species) that resulted from hybridization. Notice that it groups outside of E. blennius in the nuclear gene (S7) phylogeny.

Mitochondrial DNA is very useful to investigate relationships among closely related species, but the mitochondrial genome can cross species boundaries as a result of hybridization much easier than nuclear encoded gene copies.

I see now. Will this lead to the elevation of any of the subspecies to full species? Will it,at least, provoke some rethinking of the newmanii subspecies?

Outstanding.
Thanks for sharing.

Thanks for posting Tom. Amanda's work will be out shortly, so that will be a little more of the picture (and I'll ask if I can post her reprint pdf, as I think a lot of people would find it interesting in comparing these two studies). Some fun politics have Kyle's data included in her piece Hopefully Pete's work is coming out shortly as well.

As you might guess Dustin, newmanii is a mess. It seems it deserves a river by river analysis to make conclusions about the complex. East of the Mississippi, E. b. blennoides and philodotum are pretty clear cut. But then there's that Kentucky and Green Rivers "newmanii" thing, and once in the Tennessee... It's all bets off. Then you have the Ozark mess.

I don't envy any the task of getting funding to get the appropriate numbers of samples to say something that's clear. That might make a good NANFA-wide project, where folks get material, and ship it to a lab for analysis. I'm just back from the Ecological Society meeting, and citizen based science looks pretty danged sexy on "Greater Impacts", so I hear <wink wink> <nudge nudge>

Todd

I'm just back from the Ecological Society meeting, and citizen based science looks pretty danged sexy on "Greater Impacts", so I hear <wink wink> <nudge nudge>

Todd

Yeah, think of the money you can save by acquiring a wide array and/or large number of samples that way....While everyone certainly likes to collect their own data (specimens) for a host of reasons, QC/QA, the fun of field work, etc., etc., the fact is a roughly 2,000 sq mi range can be quite difficult and exspensive to adequately traverse. Boots are already on the ground (DNR's, poor grad students, NANFA'ns), in the right areas, and with (most of) the proper equipment to collaborate and meet these challenges. I'll get off my enthusiastic soapbox now.

Tom, what can I take from the analysis of the specimens (27,28) from the Potomac and Susquehanna? There is really no mention of them outside of the introduction (post glaciation dispersal hypothesis) and Table 1. They show up in Figure 2 in the lowest branch, but have the lowest posterior probability.

Matt-It seems that the two Potomac and Susquehanna specimens have a unique mtDNA haplotype than the other sampled specimens. Given the branch length, I would guess it is one nucleotide difference between these two and the other sampled Upper Ohio and Great Lakes populations. It would be good to know if the Potomac and Susquehanna populations have a unique haplotype relative to a broader sampling of Upper Ohio to investigate the bait bucket hypothesis introduced by Neely and George.

As I understand it, this is typical of introductions. For example, round goby in the Great Lakes have "unique" haplotypes upon introduction, only because of the bottleneck of removal from their original metapopulation. The haplotypes become less "unique" as consequent introductions are made, either from the source populations in the Great Lakes (I think this is published - look for Brown and Stepien), or what will be in press shortly, Brown's work showing multiple introductions from a population in Europe, and another haplotype in the Bay of Quinte that is unlike any other Great Lakes haplotypes. From the major haplotypes present, he's been able to infer the Eurasian source to watershed, and from that, has whittled it down to 3 potential ships! (I don't know if he'll have the cahones to try and publish that ) However, because there's only been one apparent introduction in the Bay of Quinte, he's unable to infer even a source population. They've found the same thing in both Dreissenid species and tubenose goby.

This might be some of what the seeming "uniqueness" is for the blennoides haplotype in the Susq and Potomac.

Kinda throws out that you need genetic diversity to maintain metapopluations in some ways, doesn't it? Perhaps it only suggests that some individual species invasions can be maintained on less, and that the rapid expansion is facilitated by zoogeography (low richness, available resources) and/or disturbance... But yeah, you could speculate on this all night long

Todd "Armchair Geneticist" Crail