Barcodes of invasive Lorcarids on aquatic ecosystems of México

Authors: Brenda Vega-Rodríguez, Héctor Espinosa-Pérez, Verónica Mendoza-Portillo, Luis Ayala-Pérez, Andrea Jiménez-Marín

Year: 2017 (xlix)

Abstract

Loricarids are native fish from the Orinoco and Amazon basins, and were imported to Mexico through ornamental fish trade Wildlife highly abundant populations have been seen in the Grijalva-Usumacinta basin, and since 2011 they were also recorded in some hydrological systems in northern Mexico These organisms are classified as invasive species because they displace and reduce native species populations The identification of these fishes is complex because meristic and morphometric characteristics display very little variation In addition, there is the suspicion of a possible hybridization among these species The objective of this study was to analyze, through DNA barcoding, the taxonomy and distribution of the loricarids that inhabit three waterbodies of Mexico DNA extraction was done with the DNeasy 96 Blood and Tissue purification kit of Qiagen® A 655 bp segment from the 5’ region of the CO1 gene was amplified with the FishF2_t1 and FishR2_t1 primers and sequences were compared with the GenBank database (through a BLAST nucleotide search) Collected organisms in Don Martin Dam, Coahuila, showed high similarity (923% al 938%) to Pterygoplichthys anisitsi; specimens from Lacantun river, Chiapas, had a higher similarity (879% al 981%) to Pterygoplichthys pardalisWhile specimens from Pom lagoon, Campeche, were observed to have higher similarity (913% al 976%) to Pterygoplichthys pardalis and others with Hypostomus plecostomus (905% al 959%)