Assessing the Speciation of a Cold Water Species, Japanese Sand Lance Ammodytes personatus, in the Northwestern Pacific by AFLP Markers

Assessing the status of multiple highly divergent mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) lineages and delimiting the evolutionarily significant units (ESUs) are the foundation of forecasting the influence of climate change on intraspecific genetic variation. In this study, we employed AFLP to investigate the genetic structure of Ammodytes personatus and compared the genetic variation of A. personatus in different ocean current systems. The incongruence between nuclear clades and previous mitochondrial lineages suggested that A. personatus is indeed composed of at least two genetically divergent cryptic species. Our results demonstrate that intra-species diversity should be taken into account to assess the influence of climate change on species. This study also highlights the value of the natural physical setting created by warm and cold ocean currents in eliciting a correlation between temperature and species distribution. In future studies, the exact range of temperature in both groups must be assessed with a sufficient number of samples to predict the influences of global climate change on both groups