Range-wide population structure of three tropical deepwater Eteline snappers across the Indo-Pacific basin

Deep-sea habitats may drive unique dispersal and demographic patterns for fishes, but population genetic analyses to address these questions have rarely been conducted for fishes in these environments. This study investigates the population structure of three tropical deepwater snappers of the genus Etelis that reside at 100 – 400 m depth, with broad and overlapping distributions in the Indo-Pacific. Previous studies showed little population structure within the Hawaiian Archipelago for two of these species: Etelis coruscans and E. carbunculus. Here we extend sampling to the entire geographic range of each species to resolve the population genetic architecture for these two species, as well as a recently proposed cryptic species (Etelis sp.). One goal was to determine whether deepwater snappers are more dispersive than shallow water fishes. A second goal was to determine whether submesophotic fishes have older, more stable populations than shallow reef denizens that are subject to glaci...