Abstract Variation in mitochondrial DNA sequences and allozymes in four species of trumpeter (family Latridae) from the New Zealand EEZ and the newly described species, silver trumpeter, from the central South Pacific Ocean was used to determine the phylogenetic relationships among this group of fishes. Sequence data for 424 nucleotides of the cytochrome b mitochondrial gene were obtained for 31 specimens. Three methods of phylogenetic analysis, maximum parsimony, minimum evolution, and maximum likelihood, produced similar topologies for species level relationships: with two pairs of species: Latris pacifica and L. lineata, and Latridopsis ciliaris and L. forsteri, plus the more divergent Mendosoma lineatum. There were fixed differences at 9 of 11 allozyme loci among the species; genetic distances were 0.212 and 0.213 between L. pacifica and L. lineata, and between L. ciliaris and L. forsteri, respectively. Based on both mitochondrial DNA and allozyme data we suggest that L. pacifica is a sister species to L. lineata.
Keywords Latris; Latridae; allozymes; mitochondrial DNA; new species; New Zealand; central South Pacific
R02019 Received 25 June 2002; accepted 17 April 2003; online publication
date 19 November 2003
© Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand, Volume 33, Number
4, December 2003, pp 755-767
PDF file of entire paper: Print-quality (328K) | screen-quality (121K)