Biodiversity of Philippine marine fishes: A DNA barcode reference library based on voucher specimens.

Accurate identification of fishes is essential for understanding their biology and to ensure food safety for consumers. DNA barcoding is an important tool because it can verify identifications of both whole and processed fishes that have had key morphological characters removed (e.g., filets, fish meal); however, DNA reference libraries are incomplete, and public repositories for sequence data contain incorrectly identified sequences. During a nine-year sampling program in the Philippines, a global biodiversity hotspot for marine fishes, we developed a verified reference library of cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COI) sequences for 2,525 specimens representing 984 species. Specimens were primarily purchased from markets, with additional diversity collected using rotenone or fishing gear. Species identifications were verified based on taxonomic, phenotypic, and genotypic data, and sequences are associated with voucher specimens, live-color photographs, and genetic samples catalogued at Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History. The Biodiversity of Philippine Marine Fishes dataset is released herein to increase knowledge of species diversity and distributions and to facilitate accurate identification of market fishes.

Misidentification of Bellator gymnostethus (Gilbert, 1892) as Prionotus ruscarius Gilbert amp; Starks, 1904 (Scorpaeniformes: Triglidae).

The checklist by Robertson et al. (2017) of fishes from the tropical eastern Pacific included information on three members of the family Triglidae: Bellator loxias (Jordan, 1897), Prionotus ruscarius and P. stephanophrys Lockington, 1881. Unfortunately, the identification of four specimens as P. ruscarius is incorrect, as they are Bellator gymnostethus. We thank Benjamin Victor for bringing these misidentifications to our notice through his work with mtDNA sequence data from the Barcode of Life Database (BOLD: http://www.boldsystems.org). The photographs of the four specimens on the BOLD website clearly depict a Bellator species rather than a Prionotus. However, the photograph in the 2017 paper (Figure 75, page 78), is correctly identified and labelled as P. ruscarius, and this species was collected on the cruise of the Miguel Oliver discussed in Robertson et al. (2017), see Benavides Moreno et al. (2019). This correction brings the number of triglids collected on that cruise to four species.

A DNA barcode reference library of French Polynesian shore fishes.

The emergence of DNA barcoding and metabarcoding opened new ways to study biological diversity, however, the completion of DNA barcode libraries is fundamental for such approaches to succeed. This dataset is a DNA barcode reference library (fragment of Cytochrome Oxydase I gene) for 2,190 specimens representing at least 540 species of shore fishes collected over 10 years at 154 sites across the four volcanic archipelagos of French Polynesia; the Austral, Gambier, Marquesas and Society Islands, a 5,000,000 km2 area. At present, 65% of the known shore fish species of these archipelagoes possess a DNA barcode associated with preserved, photographed, tissue sampled and cataloged specimens, and extensive collection locality data. This dataset represents one of the most comprehensive DNA barcoding efforts for a vertebrate fauna to date. Considering the challenges associated with the conservation of coral reef fishes and the difficulties of accurately identifying species using morphological characters, this publicly available library is expected to be helpful for both authorities and academics in various fields.

Deep-water bony fishes collected by the B/O Miguel Oliver on the shelf edge of Pacific Central America: an annotated, illustrated and DNA-barcoded checklist.

An annotated and photographically illustrated checklist with DNA barcodes of the species of bony fishes collected during a month-long research cruise of the Spanish Research vessel B/O Miguel Oliver is presented. The vessel made trawls on the continental shelf of the Pacific coast of Central America, in November-December 2010, at depths of 108-1625 m. This list, based on 707 specimens (of a total of 876 specimens collected during the whole expedition), includes 129 species belonging to 15 orders, 61 families, and 97 genera. New information is presented on the geographical distributions of more than a third of those species, with 29 species (22.4%) representing new records from Central American waters and 17 species (13.2%) having expanded latitudinal ranges. Data on capture depths demonstrate increased depth ranges due to new minimum and/or maximum known depths for 31 species, i.e. 24% of those captured. Tissue samples from frozen specimens were used to obtain DNA barcodes of 682 (96.5%) individuals belonging to 118 species (91.4% of those recorded here), which have been made publically available in Genbank. Those data include barcodes for 84 species (65.1% of the total collected, and 77.1% of those for which barcodes were obtained) and 30 genera (30.9% of those collected) for which no species barcodes have been previously published. Barcodes of 54 species represent the first genetic sequences of any type published for those species. The abundance of new data indicate that there is still much to learn about the composition and geographical and depth distributions of the fish fauna of the shelf edge and continental slope of this region.

A new deep-reef scorpionfish (Teleostei, Scorpaenidae, Scorpaenodes) from the southern Caribbean with comments on depth distributions and relationships of western Atlantic members of the genus.

A new species of scorpionfish, Scorpaenodes barrybrowni Pitassy & Baldwin, sp. n. which is described, was collected during submersible diving in the southern Caribbean as part of the Smithsonian's Deep Reef Observation Project (DROP). It differs from the other two western Atlantic species of the genus, Scorpaenodes caribbaeus and Scorpaenodes tredecimspinosus, in various features, including its color pattern, having an incomplete lateral line comprising 8-10 pored scales, tending to be more elongate, usually having the 11(th)-12(th) pectoral-fin rays elongate, and by 20-23% divergence in the cytochrome c oxidase I (COI) DNA barcode sequences. It further differs from one or the other of those species in head spination and in numbers of soft dorsal-fin rays, pectoral-fin rays, and precaudal + caudal vertebrae. Inhabiting depths of 95-160 m, the new species is the deepest western Atlantic member of the genus (Scorpaenodes caribbaeus occurs at depths < 35 m and Scorpaenodes tredecimspinosus from 7 to 82 m). DNA barcode data do not rigorously resolve relationships among the ten species of the genus for which those data are available.