Shared phylogeographical breaks in a Caribbean coral reef sponge and its invertebrate commensals

Aim: To test whether phylogeographical barriers in the brooding sponge Callyspongia vaginalis match breaks previously identified in the Caribbean. We also compared patterns of subdivision in the sponge to those of three of its commensals, the broadcast spawning brittle star Ophiothrix suensonii and the brooding amphipods Leucothoe ashleyae and L. kensleyi, and tested whether any shared breaks arose simultaneously.
Location: Florida, Bahamas and the Caribbean.
Methods: Subdivision of C. vaginalis populations was inferred from one mitochondrial (COI) and six nuclear loci using clustering analyses. We identified phylogeographical breaks in the sponge and its invertebrate commensals by determining geographical patterns of genetic variation and tested simultaneous population divergence across barriers shared among taxa using hierarchical approximate Bayesian computation.
Results: Sponge populations were partitioned into western and eastern groups across the Caribbean, with hierarchical su...