Abstract
The bonnethead Sphyrna tiburo is a wide-spread, small species of coastal hammerhead shark with a long history of taxonomic uncertainty, including, according to some authors, disjoint subspecies in the western Atlantic and eastern Pacific oceans. The present study investigates the level of morphometric and genetic variation within the Sphyrna tiburo complex throughout most of its distributional range including the western Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean, and the eastern Pacific. A morphometric study, including a comparison of ampullary densities, and a molecular analysis of two mitochondrial genes, was performed. We analyzed variation in cephalofoil shape between and within lineages, based on landmarks and Fourier analysis of the silhouettes. All tests delineated discrete morphological groups, including differences of ampullae density for those lineages in which this information could be unambiguously assessed. Both morphometric and molecular analysis support the existence of three different evolutionarily significant units (two in the Atlantic: one northern and one south-central, and a third in the eastern Pacific) that deserve specific taxonomic status. We urge a deep taxonomic review of this complex to gather biological data on each lineage and develop adequate independent conservation strategies and actions to protect the various evolutionary units.
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The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to the fishermen Donaldo Fuentes and Marco, Carolina Angulo, and Dr. Guillermo Duque for their help in collecting samples. We thank Demian Chapman for reading, editing, and commenting on different versions of this manuscript, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. This paper represents contribution number 20 from Instituto de Ciencias del Mar y Limnología (INCIMAR) de la Universidad del Valle, Colombia.
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AK: data collecting, data analyses, and article writing. JT: intellectual property, article writing, data collecting, data analyses. YT: data collecting. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Scientific research and collection were approved under resolución 1070 del 28 de Agosto de 2015 for collection of specimens of wild species of biological diversity for non-commercial scientific research purposes and Universidad del Valle ethics committee.
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Aroca, A.K., Tavera, J. & Torres, Y. Molecular and morphological evaluation of the bonnethead shark complex Sphyrna tiburo (Carcharhiniformes: Sphyrnidae). Environ Biol Fish 105, 1643–1658 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10641-022-01358-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10641-022-01358-x