Establishment of a coastal fish in the Azores: recent colonisation or suddenexpansion of an ancient relict population?

摘要

The processes and timescales associated with ocean-wide changes in the distribution of marine species have intrigued biologists since Darwin's earliest insights into biogeography. The Azores, a mid-Atlantic volcanic archipelago located >1000 km off the European continental shelf, offers ideal opportunities to investigate phylogeographic colonisation scenarios. The benthopelagic sparid fish known as the common two-banded seabream (Diplodus vulgaris) is now relatively common along the coastline of the Azores archipelago, but was virtually absent before the 1990s. We employed a multiple genetic marker approach to test whether the successful establishment of the Azorean population derives from a recent colonisation from western continental/island populations or from the demographic explosion of an ancient relict population. Results from nuclear and mtDNA sequences show that all Atlantic and Mediterranean populations belong to the same phylogroup, though microsatellite data indicate significant genetic divergence between the Azorean sample and all other locations, as well as among Macaronesian, western Iberian and Mediterranean regions. The results from Approximate Bayesian Computation indicate that D. vulgaris has likely inhabited the Azores for ∼40 (95% confidence interval (CI): 5.5–83.6) to 52 (95% CI:6.32–89.0) generations, corresponding to roughly 80–150 years, suggestingnear-contemporary colonisation, followed by a more recent demographic expansion thatcould have been facilitated by changing climate conditions. Moreover, the lack ofprevious records of this species over the past century, together with the absence oflineage separation and the presence of relatively few private alleles, do not excludethe possibility of an even more recent colonisation event.