The phylogeny of a reduced ‘sand goby’ group based on behavioural and life history characters |
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| Authors: | STEFANO MALAVASI CHRISTOS GKENAS IOANNIS LEONARDOS PATRIZIA TORRICELLI DEBORAH A MCLENNAN |
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| Institution: | 1. Department of Environmental Sciences, Informatics and Statistics, Castello 2737/b Università Ca' Foscari Venezia, 30122 Venice, Italy;2. Department of Biological Application and Technology, University of Ioannina, PC 45110, Ioannina, Greece;3. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Toronto, 25 Willcocks St. Toronto, ON, Canada M5S 3B2 |
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| Abstract: | Phylogenetic analysis of 27 behavioural and life history traits for five Mediterranean sand goby species (Perciformes, Gobiidae) produced one tree with a consistency index (excluding uninformative characters) of 0.756. This tree agreed with previous molecular analyses in providing strong support for the monophyly of the sand gobies, indicating that Pomatoschistus and Knipowitschia are paraphyletic and helping to resolve the ambiguous position of Economidichthys pygmaeus, placing it as the basal member of the reduced data set. Although the tree was completely resolved, the branches above E. pygmaeus were only moderately supported in the bootstrap analysis. Overall, the behavioural data provide information that may eventually help clarify the speciation bursts within the Mediterranean sand goby clade as much as is possible. © 2012 The Linnean Society of London, Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2012, 165 , 916–924. |
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| Keywords: | cladistics Gobiidae life cycle Messinian salinity crisis reproductive behaviour sound production |
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