Assessing Species Boundaries in the Freshwater Snail Family Physidae Using Coalescent-Based Delimitation Methods

ABSTRACT A common issue for several freshwater snail families is the fact that, for some genera, the criteria for species delimitation are scarce, subjected to intraspecific and ontogenetic variation, or insufficiently discrete to allow a clear distinction between species. For these genera, the use of molecular approaches is decisive in recognizing valid species. Herein, we applied coalescent methods to delimit evolutionary significant units (ESUs) in Physidae. We used 496 sequences of the mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase subunit I (COI) gene available in GenBank, ascribed to six genera and 25 nominal species, and the algorithms GMYC (General Mixed Yule-Coalescent) with two criteria (single-threshold and multiple-threshold), PTP (Poisson Tree Process), and mPTP (multi-rate Tree Poisson Process). The method that presented the best performance was the mPTP. This method showed a higher frequency of taxonomic species recovery and has delimited a lower number of ESUs (25 ESUs from a dataset attributed to 25 nominal species). Physidae is a family of freshwater snails that presents several issues related to the recognition of species boundaries. Herein, the use of coalescent delimitation methods allowed us to address important taxonomic questions, opening new avenues for future taxonomic research. Our findings have shown that the morphological operational criteria used to delimit several valid species fall within the limits of intraspecific variability, demonstrating taxonomic inflation within this family. Our results also demonstrated the presence of cryptic diversity under the nominal species Physella acuta (Draparnaud, 1805), Beringophysa jennessi (Dall, 1919), Physella pomilia (Conrad, 1834), and Physella gyrina (Say, 1821).