Boring Bivalves: Using Molecular Phylogenetics to Resolve Species Identities in Botula (Mytilidae)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Based on morphological examination of rock-, shell-, and coral-boring bivalves in the marine genus Botula, Wilson and Tait (1984) concluded that this genus comprised a single Recent species, Botula fusca (Gmelin, 1791), with a pan-tropical distribution spanning the western Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. Variation in shell colour, habitat, depth, and anatomy were determined to reflect variation within this one species. In a subsequent review of Recent and fossil Botula, Kleemann (2007) expressed doubts about a monotypic Botula given “striking morphological differences” between several described species, advocating for the study of soft tissues and application of molecular tools to help resolve species identities. Here, for the first time, we have undertaken a molecular phylogenetic approach to explore species-level relationships within the genus Botula. Our taxon sampling included freshly collected specimens from the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary in the context of ongoing research into bioeroding bivalves at reef restoration sites, in addition to previous collections from the western Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans available at the Florida Museum of Natural History and the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. Based on analyses of mitochondrial (COI and 16S rRNA) and nuclear (H3 and 28S rRNA) genes, the genus Botula appears to be monophyletic, with the contentious species currently classified as Leiosolenus kleemanni (Valentich-Scott, 2008) falling within Botula rather than Leiosolenus. High levels of sequence differentiation among samples in this study, including ones previously identified as “Botula silicula”, Botula cinnamomea, “Leiosolenus” kleemanni, and Botula fusca, supported them as distinct species. Our phylogenetic analyses also identified a potential cryptic species within western Atlantic Botula fusca. Increased knowledge of diversity within the genus Botula should lead to a more accurate understanding of the role of these bioeroding species in reef ecosystems.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".