Abstract
The number of species dispersing to higher and/or lower latitudes, in association with temperature warming, is growing exponentially with only a few described opposite cases of dispersal to warmer regions. Here we describe the dispersal of the solitary ascidian Ascidia virginea, considered native to the seas of North Europe, to disperse to warmer regions: the Eastern Mediterranean and a Red Sea marina. This case highlights an emerging trend of taxa being introduced by marine vessels and successfully establishing populations in unfavourable environmental conditions by opportunistically utilizing niche areas. We provide molecular and morphological data that facilitate the identification of A. virginea in regions in which it may have previously been overlooked. We also employ ecological-niche modeling to project habitat suitability for this species, predicting the coasts of North America, South America, the northwest Pacific, and the Red Sea as moderately and highly suitable habitats. Phylogenetic analyses based on the mitochondrial COI gene reveal that the A. virginea sequences obtained in this work belong to a well-supported clade, including previously published sequences of A. virginea from California and Florida, localities where its presence was not predicted by our model. Furthermore, publicly available COI sequences of A. malaca and A. sydneiensis are assigned to the same A. virginea clade, implying a case of synonymy or misidentification. Our results provide useful data for the accurate identification of this species when expanding into other areas in which it may become a nuisance, and highlight the need to further explore the potential of cold-water species to establish in ports and niche areas in warmer regions.
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Data availability
All the uncropped images are available in the Figshare repository (https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.22589515 for further images of the dissected specimens). The sequences obtained in this study were deposited to in the European Nucleotide Archive under accession numbers OX416767-OX416775. The sequences are still confidential. The samples examined have been deposited in the Zoological Museum of the University of Bari (MUZAC-6669) and the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History and National Research Center (AS26215-AS26216; AS26223-AS26229; AS26172).
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the Steinhardt Museum of National History at Tel-Aviv University and the Inter-University Institute (IUI) in Eilat for their technical support, to Michal Haddas-Sasson for her help at the bench and to Naomi Paz for editorial assistance. CG acknowledges the Molecular Biodiversity Laboratory of the Italian node of Lifewatch (CNR, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Italy), Elixir-IT (the European Research Infrastructure for Life Science), and CNRBiOmics (Infrastructural project PIR01_00017 of MUR-Ministero dell’Università e della Ricerca, Italy). We wish to thank the editor for his helpful suggestions and acknowledge the anonymous reviewers whose comments considerably improved the manuscript.
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FMo was supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation program under grant agreement N° 730984, ASSEMBLE Plus project. Additional funding was provided by ISF-NSFC grant number 3347/20 to NS and ISF grant number 652/20 to DH.
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NS, LN, and FMo collected and preserved the animals. FMo and FMa carried out the morphological analysis. RH, DH, FMo and CG conducted the molecular analysis and RH & DH performed the phylogenetic tree construction, LN and NS took care of the curation, shipment, and specimens' availability. NS and FMo supervised the study and drafted the manuscript together with DH. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.
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Montesanto, F., Hadjez, R., Mastrototaro, F. et al. Against the flow: Integrated taxonomy and environmental suitability of a cold-water species dispersing to warmer waters. Biol Invasions 26, 953–973 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10530-023-03222-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10530-023-03222-0