Biogeographic barriers are differentially permeable based on traits: Movement of hypoxia tolerant mormyrid fish in the Lake Victoria basin

Abstract

Lake Nabugabo is a small satellite lake separated from Lake Victoria by hypoxic swamps that impose a biogeographic barrier to fish assemblages. Some species occur exclusively in Nabugabo while others show high differentiation across this barrier, yet air-breathing fishes show nearly zero genetic differentiation between the two lakes. We hypothesize that hypoxia-tolerant fishes, unlike other non-air-breathing species, would have similarly low genetic differentiation across the barrier. We used pooled RAD-seq to examine the degree of genetic differentiation in two species of non-air-breathing but hypoxia-tolerant mormyrid fishes, Marcusenius victoriae and Petrocephalus degeni. Other non-air-breathing fishes have been shown to have FST values as low as 0.05 but mostly between 0.10 and 0.20; however, we discovered that the genetic differentiation in our focal species was very low, with FST values between 0.02 and 0.04, making them much more comparable to air-breathing fishes with FST values of near zero. We conclude that this and other analogous barriers should be understood as differentially permeable depending on the traits of the organisms crossing them, such as hypoxia tolerance in this case.