Can consumers avoid mislabelling? Genetic species identification provides recommendations for shrimp/prawn products.

Background: Crustaceans of the superfamily Penaeoidea (e.g., shrimps and prawns) are among the most commercially available aquatic products worldwide.

Climate and Soil Microsite Conditions Determine Local Adaptation in Declining Silver Fir Forests.

Ongoing climatic change is threatening the survival of drought-sensitive tree species, such as silver fir (). Drought-induced dieback had been previously explored in this conifer, although the role played by tree-level genetic diversity and its relationship with growth patterns and soil microsite conditions remained elusive. We used double digest restriction-site-associated DNA sequencing (ddRADseq) to describe different genetic characteristics of five silver fir forests in the Spanish Pyrenees, including declining and non-declining trees.

Molecular Correlation between Larval, Deutonymph and Adult Stages of the Water Mite .

The systematics of many groups of organisms has been based on the adult stage. Morphological transformations that occur during development from the embryonic to the adult stage make it difficult (or impossible) to identify a juvenile (larval) stage in some species. Hydrachnidia (Acari, Actinotrichida, which inhabit mainly continental waters) are characterized by three main active stages-larval, deutonymph and adult-with intermediate dormant stages.

Pleistocene climate change and the formation of regional species pools.

Although the description of bioregions dates back to the origin of biogeography, the processes originating their associated species pools have been seldom studied. Ancient historical events are thought to play a fundamental role in configuring bioregions, but the effects of more recent events on these regional biotas are largely unknown. We used a network approach to identify regional and sub-regional faunas of European Carabus beetles and developed a method to explore the relative contribution of dispersal barriers, niche similarities and phylogenetic history on their configuration.

Minimal barcode distance between two water mite species from Madeira Island: a cautionary tale.

In this work, we compare morphological and molecular data in their ability to distinguish between species of water mites (Acari, Prostigmata, Hydrachnidia). We have focused on the two species of the genus Lebertia inhabiting the island of Madeira. While traditional morphological traits were initially sufficient to distinguish between these two species, the molecular data were more dependable on the kind of analysis carried out.

Geography and major host evolutionary transitions shape the resource use of plant parasites.

The evolution of resource use in herbivores has been conceptualized as an analog of the theory of island biogeography, assuming that plant species are islands separated by phylogenetic distances. Despite its usefulness, this analogy has paradoxically led to neglecting real biogeographical processes in the study of macroevolutionary patterns of herbivore-plant interactions. Here we show that host use is mostly determined by the geographical cooccurrence of hosts and parasites in spider mites (Tetranychidae), a globally distributed group of plant parasites.

Ecological change predicts population dynamics and genetic diversity over 120 000 years.

While ecological effects on short-term population dynamics are well understood, their effects over millennia are difficult to demonstrate and convincing evidence is scant. Using coalescent methods, we analysed past population dynamics of three lizard species (Psammodromus hispanicus, P. edwardsianus, P.

Molecular organization and evolution of 5S rDNA in the genus Merluccius and their phylogenetic implications.

The molecular organization of the 5S rRNA gene family has been studied in a wide variety of animal taxa, including many bony fish species. It is arranged in tandemly repeated units consisting of a highly conserved 120 base pair-long region, which encodes for the 5S rRNA, and a nontranscribed spacer (NTS) of variable length, which contains regulatory elements for the transcription of the coding sequence. In this work, a comparative analysis of 5S ribosomal DNA (rDNA) organization and evolution in the 12 species of the genus Merluccius, which are distributed in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, was carried out.