Meeting Abstract

S8-1.2  Saturday, Jan. 5  An Overview of Decapod Molecular Phylogeny TOON, Alicia*; SEAMONS, Ryan ; ROBLES, Rafael; FELDER, Darryl L ; CRANDALL, Keith A ; BYU; BYU; Univ. of Louisiana; Univ. of Louisiana; BYU a_toon@byu.edu

Decapoda is the most species rich group of Crustaceans containing numerous economically important and morphologically diverse leading to the large amount of research on this group. There are several competing hypotheses concerning the relationships among the major lineages of Decapoda (see Porter et al.). Our research groups are attempting to estimate a robust Decapod phylogeny based on molecular and morphological data to resolve these relationships and then test a variety of hypotheses associated with the diversity of decapod morphological evolution. The Order Decapoda includes roughly 175 families and greater than 15 000 described species. Complicating things further are the estimated 437 million years since the origin of the Decapoda with the major lineages estimated to have been established by 325 million years ago. Constructing a molecular phylogeny across such a timescale requires serious consideration of markers that have enough variation to reconstruct relationships at the fine scale (family level) as well as being conservative enough to be used across infraorders representing these deeper timescales. We have therefore developed a database of markers for use at different scales of the evolutionary spectrum in decapods. We present potential mitochondrial and nuclear markers with an estimation of variation at the genus and family level, and among infraorders for Decapoda. In addition to developing a variety of primer sets, we have applied many of these primers to our current collection of representatives of the decapod crustaceans. Our resulting phylogenetic estimate is then compared with previous estimates of phylogenetic relationships among the Decapoda. Finally, we identify those families where sampling is still needed to achieve our goal and a complete family level phylogeny of the decapod crustaceans.