Eobathynella cf. yeojuensis

Ji, Su-Jung & Min, Gi-Sik, 2022, Eobathynella gwangjuensis sp. nov., a new species of Parabathynellidae (Crustacea, Bathynellacea) from South Korea, Zootaxa 5138 (5), pp. 549-562 : 558

Eobathynella cf. yeojuensis

Material examined. Wonju-si (37°22′ 34.1″N, 127° 51′ 15.2″E), South Korea. Collected by Chi-Woo Lee (25 March 2015). Three female specimens examined ( NNIBR 90880–90882). By our observation, no morphological differences were found between Eobathynella cf. yeojuensis specimens and E. yeojuensis . Thus, we consider that the studied specimens to correspond to E. yeojuensis . However, considering that subterranean taxa including the Parabathynellidae have many cryptic species that are difficult to distinguish based only on morphological characteristics and have been regarded as short-range endemics because of their small spatial distributions ( Guzik et al. 2008; Perina et al. 2018), we cannot be completely certain that they are the same species until compared to molecular data from E. yeojuensis collected from the type locality.

Molecular analysis. We sequenced and analyzed DNA extracted from three E. gwangjuensis sp. nov. and one Eobathynella cf. yeojuensis specimen ( Table 1 ). A total of 1,406 bp for 18S rDNA and 792 bp for CO1 were obtained. The intraspecific genetic distance between the three individuals of the new species ranged from 0.0 to 0.5% for CO1 and were all identical for 18S rDNA sequences. The pairwise genetic distance between the new species and Eobathynella cf. yeojuensis was 4% for 18S rDNA and 21.8–22.0% for CO1. We constructed a maximum likelihood tree for selected parabathynellid genera based on 417 bp of CO1 and 952 bp of 18S rRNA gene sequences ( Fig. 7 ).

Figures

FIGURE 7. A maximum likelihood analysis on the parabathynellid genera. Numbers on nodes represent bootstrap values from 1,000 replications.Information of the molecular data used for the molecular analysis is provided in Table 1. (A) phylogenetic tree based on mitochondrial 18S rRNA sequences (952 bp); (B) phylogenetic tree based on mitochondrial CO1 sequences (417 bp).