Hidden in the dark: complex evolutionary history revealed by genome-wide analyses of cave amphipods

Subterranean environments provide unique habitats and maintain numerous biodiversity. However, its underlying evolutionary processes remain fully unexplored, and especially complex evolutionary hypotheses have not been tested or documented well. In this study, we investigate the evolutionary history of isolated individuals of the subterranean amphipod Pseudocrangonyx (Crustacea: Amphipoda: Pseudocrangonyctidae) within a single cave (Fusa Cave) in northeastern Japan. To examine the mechanism of the diversification on micro-scale, we employed genome-wide information obtained from NGS.