Phylogeny of Malacostraca is the evolutionary relationships of the largest of the six classes of crustaceans, containing about 40,000 living species, divided among 16 orders. Its members display a great diversity of body forms. Although the class Malacostraca is united by a number of well-defined and documented features, which were recognised a century ago by William Thomas Calman in 1904,[1] the phylogenetic relationship (the evolutionary tree) of the orders which compose this class is unclear due to the vast diversity present in their morphology. Molecular studies have attempted to infer the phylogeny of this clade,[2][3][4] resulting in phylogenies which have a limited amount of morphological support.[5] To resolve a well-supported eumalacostracan phylogeny and obtain a robust tree, it will be necessary to look beyond the most commonly utilized sources of data (nuclear ribosomal and mitochondrial sequences).[6]
The Malacostraca is assumed to be monophyletic due to several common morphological traits which are present throughout the group and due to molecular studies that have also confirmed it.[7]
William T. Calman in 1904 and 1909 described these common morphological features and introduced the major taxonomic subdivisions of the Malacostraca which are still in use today: he divided the Malacostraca in two subclasses the Phyllocarida and the Eumalacostraca, which is further subdivided into four superorders: Eucarida, Peracarida, Hoplocarida and Syncarida.[8]
W.T. Calman coined the term caridoid facies for the common eumalacostracan (shrimp-like) features; the most important of these is the constant number of segments in each tagma: members of this class have five segments in the cephalon, eight thoracic segments (thoracomeres) and six segments in the pleon and possess a telson, which forms a characteristic tail fan when the uropods are present. Many other characteristic features are present but their presence varies amongst lineages; one notable ancestral feature which varies is the carapace, which may be absent, reduced or well developed covering the whole cephalothorax. Furthermore, Richter, S., & Scholtz, G. (2001)[9] list five separate unique eumalacostracan features which taken together form a strong argument in favour of the monophyly of the Eumalacostraca.
However debate arises in the relationship between the subdivisions of the Malacostraca, due to the presence of several contrasting features.
Phylogenetic trees from several published studies. The first six were obtained via morphological data whereas the last three were obtained with molecular data using a GTR+Γ+I model (General time reversible + gamma distribution + independent frequencies). (Adapted from Spear et al., 2005 )
The traditional basal malacostracans
Diagram of Nebalia bipes showing the major features of the external anatomy: 1: antennule; 2: rostrum; 3: carapace; 4: abdomen / pleon; 5: furca; 6: telson; 7: pleopods; 8: antenna; 9: thoracopods; 10: eye
The Phyllocarida is a group of about 36 small marine species that are distributed across planet and possess a characteristic large bivalve carapace and an elongated abdomen with no uropods. This group is believed to be the most primitive malacostracan group, because they lack some of the caridoid facies, such as the presence of seven abdominal segments (eight if telson is included). Furthermore, one study by Wills places them as a sister branch to the Cephalocarida and basal to a Maxillopoda + Eumalacostraca clade and therefore making the Malacostraca paraphyletic.[10]
The Eumalacostraca — the malacostraca minus the phyllocarida — were subdivided on the basis of several features, although which group is basal is unclear. Several authors, such as Siewin (1963), believe that the Syncarida is the most basal group due to the absence of morphological traits that are present in the remaining eumalacostracans; in addition, the Syncarida are distributed worldwide in reclusive habitats such as interstitial and groundwater, whereas their extensive fossil record shows that they were once marine, implying that the species present today are remnants of a more abundant group. A second problematic group often attributed to be basal in the Eumalacostraca clade is the Hoplocarida. This group is composed of 200 species commonly called mantis shrimps, which are found in shallow tropical and subtropical marine habitats that have adapted to a predatorial life thanks to their specialized large second pair of thoracopods (thoracic appendices), raptorial legs, which are used to capture prey, in fact their name is a combination of Greek words meaning “armed shrimp”. Its precise location amongst the Malacostraca is unclear and has been proposed to be a sister group to the remaining eumalacostracans due to its ancient fossil record [9][11][12] but it has also been placed either sister to the Eucarida [10] or even inside the Eucarida by molecular studies.[3]
In fact, the Malacostracan has a well-documented fossil record, that, although patchy or missing entirely (ghost lineage) for certain clades, offer a unique opportunity to analyse the morphology of the ancestral taxa of a clade or a dead-end sister taxa (plesion), whose age (determined by its stratigraphy) gives an estimate of how long has a group been around. However, the major limitation to fossilized samples is that typically the soft parts do not fossilize and are therefore lost, as a consequence a much more limited amount of information that can be gathered. Furthermore, some taxa may not fossilize well, and therefore leave no trace even though they existed, when this occurs in the fossil record, the period where the taxa are expected to appear is called a ghost range.
Eucarida is a diverse and abundant group, whose members have a carapace which is fused to the thoracic segments to form a cephalothorax. The Eucarida is divided into three orders, the Euphausiacea, the Decapoda and the Amphionidacea. The members of the Euphausiacea are commonly called krill and are all marine shrimp-like species whose pleopods (abdominal appendages) function as swimmerets, they swarm and mostly feed on plankton, this group is composed of only 90 species, but some of these are one of the most abundant species on the planet, in fact, it is estimated that the biomass of the Antarctic krillEuphausia superba is 500 million tons.[13]
The Decapoda is a group with 18,000 species which have 5 pairs of thoracopods and a well-developed carapace that covers the gills (which are exposed in krill). Many of these species have common names and are often eaten. The decapods are further subdivided on the basis of the gill structure into two suborders Dendrobranchiata (prawns) and Pleocyemata, which is further subdivided into several infraorders, such as the Caridea ("true shrimp"),[14] the Stenopodidea (boxer shrimp) and the Anomura and the Brachyura (crabs) and so forth. In addition, there is an enigmatic eucarid species, Amphionides reynaudii, which is the sole representative of its order, but due to the loss of several features resulting from its small size, its classification has been unclear.[8]
The other major malacostracan superorder, the Peracarida, is highly diverse in habit, size and shape and contains 21,500 species, but this number is a gross underestimate as the number of described species has tripled in the past 20 years.[5] Most authors studying morphological characters propose a monophyletic Peracarida which forms a well supported subtree that is sister to a Eucarida subtree, one paper is an exception [9] and proposes that the Peracarida is derived from a polyphyletic Eucarida. With the exception of thermosbaenacean species, a characteristic of the members of this group is that they brood their young in a marsupium formed by branches (endites) of their thoracopods, called oostegites.[8] The Peracarida is divided into nine orders (Isopoda, Amphipoda, Mysida, Lophogastrida, Cumacea, Tanaidacea, Mictacea, Thermosbaenacea and Spelaeogriphacea), although some authors prefer to unite two pairs of orders with similar organisms, which are the Mysidacea, formed by the Mysida and the Lophogastrida, and the Edriophthalma, formed by the Isopoda and the Amphipoda.[11]
The members of the Mysida and the Lophogastrida have several common features: they are shrimp-like with compound stalked eyes and have a carapace which covers most of the thorax but does not fuse with the last four thoracic segments (as instead is seen in the Eucarida), they possess well-developed thoracopods (for swimming) and tail fan, they also have similar behaviour (swarming) and foregut structure;[8] Pygocephalomorph, a fossil from the Permian, appears similar to the Lophogastrida, which in addition to other factors, has traditionally allowed the Lophogastrida to be identified as the more primitive Mysidacea. However, the monophyly of the Mysidacea been disputed,[3][4][8] due to molecular data and several differences, one profound difference between the two taxa is that in the Mysida the carapace acts as a respiratory surface due to the absence of gills, which are however present in the Lophogastrida. When they are considered together many authors have put Mysidacea basal to the remaining peracarids ((paraphyletic)Ruppert & Barnes, 1994;[10][11] (monophyletic)[12]), others have even either grouped them with Euphausiacea to form the Schizopoda[15] or made them basal to a eucarid subtree [16] (paraphyletic).
The Isopoda and the Amphipoda are two of the largest pericarid groups, they both lack a carapace, possess sessile compound eyes and lack a sharp demarcation between thoracic and abdominal segments, but however differ in several features, such as gills. Isopoda contains 10,000 species, the organisms are dorsoventrally flattened and occupy not only marine and freshwater habitats, but even terrestrial (woodlice) for which they developed a thickened cuticle and gas exchange organs, allowing them to live even in arid regions.
Amphipoda is a highly diverse group of 8,000 species, ranging from the Caprellida with a long and narrow body shape (skeleton shrimp) to the shrimp-like Gammaridea (scuds and sand hoppers). The position of the Isopoda and the Amphipoda amongst the Peracarida is also debated, some authors support a derived united group (Edriophthalma) which is either monophyletic [10][11][12] or paraphyletic (Wheeler, 1998), others support a basal paraphyletic Isopoda and Amphipoda group (Watling, 1999); however, other authors believe that several features that unite the Isopoda and the Amphipoda are homoplasious and that the two groups reside with different groups: one[9] proposed a basal Amphipoda to a clade formed from Isopoda + Tanaidacea and Cumacea + Mictacea + Speleogriphacea, while some older phylogenetic trees [17][18] place the Amphipoda and the Mysidacea basal to the Peracarida (without the Thermosbaenacea) either as a polyphyletic or a monophyletic group, whereas the Isopoda are in a derived clade with Tanaidacea.
Molecular studies by Jarman et al. (2000),[2] Spears et al. (2005)[3] and Meland & Willassen (2007)[4] (which was derived from Spears et al. (2005) by adding 22 mysidacean taxa to those 26 taxa) suggest a phylogeny with some elements similar to that proposed by Richter & Scholtz (2001),[9] but disprove the monophyly of both the Edriophthalma and the Mysidacea and do not possess a basal eumalacostracan taxa or a basal peracarid taxa (the Hoplocarida and the Syncarida, respectively in [9]): The Amphipoda (with Spleogriphacea) form a clade with the Lophogastrida, the Isopoda are in a derived clade with the Cumacea and Tanaidacea, while most importantly the Mysida in all three analyses falls basal to the non-Peracarida subtree,[2][3][4] which however has a limited morphological support (Poore, 2005).
The remaining Peracarida orders are the cryptic and either moderately abundant, Cumacea and Tanaidacea, or are extremely rare and relictual, Mictacea, Spelaeogriphacea, and Thermosbaenacea.
There are about 1,600 members of the Cumacea, these are small burrowing crustaceans which have a characteristic large bulbous carapace (covering three thoracic segments) and an elongated abdomen which finishes in a pleotelson with stylus-like uropods, in fact due to their peculiar shape they are sometimes called hooded shrimp. Tanaidacea is a group of 1,500 species which are small burrowing or tube-dwelling crustaceans with a short carapace (covering two thoracic segments) that possess a pair of chelate second thoracopods (gnathopods).
Only three extant and two fossil speleogriphacean species have been found, these are blind cave-dwelling species with a short carapace (one thoracic segment); while the Mictacea is a group erected only two decades ago, and to date, five species have been found, Mictocaris halope (cave dwelling) and four species in the family Hursutiidae, in the genera Hirsutia (at 1,000 meter depths) and Thetispelecaris (submarine caves), these blind species lack a carapace but have a well-developed headshield, and have reduced pleopods. This enigmatic group is believed by some authors not to be monophyletic, in fact one author proposed that Mictocaris halope should be grouped with the Spelaeogriphacea, forming the Cosinzeneacea.[19]
The Thermosbaenacea are a group of 11 species found in hot springs, caves and groundwater that has the peculiarity that its brooding pouch is formed by its extended carapace and not by modified thoracopod endites as occurs in the remaining peracarids, for this reason some authors have removed this group from the Peracarida and placed it in its own superorder, the Pancarida, basal to the Pericarida.[9][17][18]
The major feature that emerges from the picture of the phylogeny of the Malacostraca is that their diversity has resulted in several studies proposing dramatically different phylogenetic trees. With the advent of DNA sequencing, molecular studies have not helped a particular evolutionary model based on morphology to become the accepted one, but rather they have added more uncertainty to the accepted phylogenetic relationships: in fact not only they contradicted several morphological studies, but they also questioned the monophyly of the Eucarida and the Peracarida, in particular regarding the positions of the Mysida the Syncarida and the Hoplocarida, furthermore the molecular studies to date are only three, two of which overlap [3][4] and concentrate on the Peracarida, while the third [2] uses a limited amount of taxa.
Malacostraca is the second largest of the six classes of pancrustaceans just behind hexapods, containing about 40,000 living species, divided among 16 orders. Its members, the malacostracans, display a great diversity of body forms and include crabs, lobsters, crayfish, shrimp, krill, prawns, woodlice, amphipods, mantis shrimp, tongue-eating lice and many other less familiar animals. They are abundant in all marine environments and have colonised freshwater and terrestrial habitats. They are segmented animals, united by a common body plan comprising 20 body segments, and divided into a head, thorax, and abdomen.
Amphipoda is an order of malacostracan crustaceans with no carapace and generally with laterally compressed bodies. Amphipods range in size from 1 to 340 millimetres and are mostly detritivores or scavengers. There are more than 9,900 amphipod species so far described. They are mostly marine animals, but are found in almost all aquatic environments. Some 1,900 species live in fresh water, and the order also includes the terrestrial sandhoppers such as Talitrus saltator and Arcitalitrus sylvaticus.
Mysida is an order of small, shrimp-like crustaceans in the malacostracan superorder Peracarida. Their common name opossum shrimps stems from the presence of a brood pouch or "marsupium" in females. The fact that the larvae are reared in this pouch and are not free-swimming characterises the order. The mysid's head bears a pair of stalked eyes and two pairs of antennae. The thorax consists of eight segments each bearing branching limbs, the whole concealed beneath a protective carapace and the abdomen has six segments and usually further small limbs.
Leptostraca is an order of small, marine crustaceans. Its members, including the well-studied Nebalia, occur throughout the world's oceans and are usually considered to be filter-feeders. It is the only extant order in the subclass Phyllocarida. They are believed to represent the most primitive members of their class, the Malacostraca, and first appear in the fossil record during the Cambrian period.
Eucarida is a superorder of the Malacostraca, a class of the crustacean subphylum, comprising the decapods, krill, and Angustidontida. They are characterised by having the carapace fused to all thoracic segments, and by the possession of stalked eyes.
Lophogastrida is an order of malacostracan crustaceans in the superorder Peracarida, comprising shrimp-like animals that mostly inhabit the relatively deep pelagic waters of the oceans throughout the world.
The superorder Peracarida is a large group of malacostracan crustaceans, having members in marine, freshwater, and terrestrial habitats. They are chiefly defined by the presence of a brood pouch, or marsupium, formed from thin flattened plates (oostegites) borne on the basalmost segments of the legs. Peracarida is one of the largest crustacean taxa and includes about 12,000 species. Most members are less than 2 cm (0.8 in) in length, but the largest is probably the giant isopod which can reach 76 cm (30 in). The earliest known perecaridian was Oxyuropoda ligioides, a fossil of which has been found dating to the Late Devonian of Ireland.
Phliantidae is a family of isopod-like amphipod crustaceans chiefly from the southern hemisphere.
Eumalacostraca is a subclass of crustaceans, containing almost all living malacostracans, or about 40,000 described species. The remaining subclasses are the Phyllocarida and possibly the Hoplocarida. Eumalacostracans have 19 segments. This arrangement is known as the "caridoid facies", a term coined by William Thomas Calman in 1909. The thoracic limbs are jointed and used for swimming or walking. The common ancestor is thought to have had a carapace, and most living species possess one, but it has been lost in some subgroups.
Cumacea is an order of small marine crustaceans of the superorder Peracarida, occasionally called hooded shrimp or comma shrimp. Their unique appearance and uniform body plan makes them easy to distinguish from other crustaceans. They live in soft-bottoms such as mud and sand, mostly in the marine environment. There are more than 1,500 species of cumaceans formally described. The species diversity of Cumacea increases with depth.
Edriophthalma is a disused peracarid (Malacostraca) classification comprising Isopoda and Amphipoda, first proposed by William Elford Leach in 1815. They have several common features, such as the fact that they both lack a carapace, possess sessile compound eyes, and thoracic coxae fused to their pleurites. Some molecular studies have shown that these are not related. The group has also been known as Acaridea and Arthrostraca.
Aeschronectida is an extinct order of mantis shrimp-like crustaceans which lived in the Mississippian subperiod in what is now Montana. They exclusively lived in the Carboniferous, or the age of amphibians. They have been found mostly in the U.S. and in the British Isles, in 1979 species were found in the Madera Formation in New Mexico. Aeschronectida was first identified appearing in Continental Europe in around 2014. While sharing similar characteristics to Stomatopoda, they lack certain physical characteristics of that taxon. The first species of Aeschronectida is accredited to Frederick R. Schram. They diverge substantially from typical hoplocaridan morphology by having more unmodified thoracopods. It's theorized that these thoracopods evolved to become more specialized, making them potential ancestors to Stomatopoda.
The Mysidacea is a group of shrimp-like crustaceans in the superorder Peracarida, comprising the two extant orders Mysida and Lophogastrida and the prehistoric Pygocephalomorpha. Current data indicate that despite their external similarities, the three orders are not closely related, and the taxon Mysidacea is not used in modern taxonomy.
Platyarthridae is a family of woodlice, containing the following genera:
Crustaceans are a group of arthropods that are a part of the subphylum Crustacea, a large, diverse group of mainly aquatic arthropods including decapods, seed shrimp, branchiopods, fish lice, krill, remipedes, isopods, barnacles, copepods, opossum shrimps, amphipods and mantis shrimp. The crustacean group can be treated as a subphylum under the clade Mandibulata. It is now well accepted that the hexapods emerged deep in the Crustacean group, with the completed group referred to as Pancrustacea. The three classes Cephalocarida, Branchiopoda and Remipedia are more closely related to the hexapods than they are to any of the other crustaceans.
The clade Multicrustacea constitutes the largest superclass of crustaceans, containing approximately four-fifths of all described crustacean species, including crabs, lobsters, crayfish, shrimp, krill, prawns, woodlice, barnacles, copepods, amphipods, mantis shrimp and others. The largest branch of multicrustacea is the class Malacostraca.
Siriella is a genus of mysid crustaceans form the family Mysidae, consisting of approximately 90 species. Found in all seas except cold Arctic and Antarctic waters, the genus is most diverse in tropics.
Gammarus mucronatus is a species of scud in the family Gammaridae. It is found in the coasts of the North American Atlantic seaboard and the Gulf of Mexico.
↑ Georg Ossian Sars (1870). Carcinologiske Bidrag til Norges Fauna over de ved Norges Kysters forekommende Mysider. Vol. 1. Christiana: Brøgger & Christies Bogtrykkeri.
↑ L. Watling (1999). "Towards understanding the relationship of the peracaridan orders: the necessity of determining exact homologies". In Frederick R. Schram & J. Carel von Vaupel Klein (ed.). Crustaceans and the Biodiversity Crisis. Proceedings of the Fourth International Crustacean Congress, Amsterdam: The Netherlands, July 20–24, 1998, Vol. I. Brill Publishers. pp.73–89. ISBN978-90-04-11387-9.
1 2 R. Siewing (1963). "Studies in malacostracan morphology: results and problems". In H. B. Whittington; W. D. Rolfe (eds.). Phylogeny and Evolution of Crustacea. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Museum of Comparative Zoology. pp.85–103.
1 2 Ana Maria S. Pires (1987). "Potiicoara brasiliensis: a new genus and species of Spelaeogriphacea (Crustacea: Peracarida) from Brasil with a phylogenetic analysis of the Peracarida". Journal of Natural History. 21 (1): 225–238. doi:10.1080/00222938700770101.
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