Genetic evidence for multiple geographic populations of the giant mottled eel Anguilla marmorata in the Pacific and Indian oceans

Anguillid eels have been believed to have a unique catadromous life history completed within a particular ocean current system, and consequently to have extraordinary population structures, with each species comprising a single, virtually panmictic population with a species-specific spawning area far offshore. The giant mottled eel Anguilla marmorata is enigmatic in this respect because it is widely distributed from East Africa to the central South Pacific, where several different current systems exist, and apparently must have multiple spawning areas. To address this issue, the population structure was examined through the mitochondrial (mt) DNA analysis of 162 individuals collected from ten localities representing the overall distributional range. Nucleotide sequencing of a 626-bp segment in the control region of the mtDNA revealed 151 haplotypes, and these were clustered into several major groups supported by high bootstrap probabilities. Sequence differences among geographic samples revealed the existence of five geographic populations around North Pacific, Madagascar, Sumatra, Fiji, and Tahiti. Genetic differentiation among the populations in the Southern Hemisphere was supported by examination of nuclear DNA with amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) analysis performed on 76 individuals from four sampling localities in the Southern Hemisphere. The distribution pattern of five populations was closely associated with the water-mass structure of oceans and major current systems. This observation suggests a hypothesis that present population differentiation in A. marmorata might have resulted from the establishment of new population-specific spawning sites in different oceanic current systems as the species colonized new areas, as its unique catadromous life history of anguillid eels.