The different fates of two Asian horseshoe crab species with different dispersal abilities

Impending anthropogenic climate change will severely impact coastal organisms at unprecedented speed. Knowledge on organisms’ evolutionary responses to past sea level fluctuations and estimation of their evolutionary potential is therefore indispensable in efforts to mitigate the effects of future climate change. We sampled tens of thousands of genomic markers of ~300 individuals in two of the four extant horseshoe crab species across the complex archipelagic Singapore Straits. Carcinoscorpius rotundicauda Latreille, a less mobile mangrove species, has finer population structure and lower genetic diversity compared to the dispersive deep-sea Tachypleus gigas Müller. Even though the source populations of both species during the Last Glacial Maximum exhibited comparable effective population sizes, the less dispersive C. rotundicauda seems to lose genetic diversity much more quickly because of population fragmentation. Contra previous studies’ results, we predict that the more commonly sig..., The datasets are single nucleotide polymorphism collected from two horseshoe crab species across the Singapore Straits using double-digest RAD sequencing.
, The datasets are STACKS file for the SNP calling. Please see ReadMe for details.