Meeting Abstract

33.11  Friday, Jan. 4  An Expanded, Morphology-Based, Cladistic Analysis of the Clawed Lobsters TSHUDY, D.*; AHYONG, S.T.; CHAN, T.-Y.; SORHANNUS, U. ; Edinboro University of Pennsylvania; Australian Museum; National Taiwan Ocean University; Edinboro University of Pennsylvania dtshudy@edinboro.edu

A generic level phylogeny of the marine clawed lobsters is interpreted by cladistic analysis of a 100+ character matrix. Morphology-based phylogenies have been presented previously (e.g. Tshudy and Babcock, 1997; Ahyong, 2006). The present study expands on these analyses by integrating many additional morphologic characters. All genera, extinct and extant, of the families Nephropidae, Thaumastochelidae, Enoplometopidae and Glypheidae are included in the analysis. The primary objective is to produce a genus-level phylogeny to be compared to recently produced DNA trees. Also evaluated are the abundance, nature and taxonomic distribution of homoplasy in the data matrix, as well as the sensitivity of the analysis to variables such as the number of taxa included, especially fossil taxa with missing character data. Morphologic and DNA data will be combined in analyses subsequent to the present study. This work was supported by an NSF Decapod Assembling a Tree of Life grant (EF-0531762).