Comprehensive molecular phylogeny and diversification of snappers (Actinopterygii: Perciformes: Lutjanidae) from the Odisha coast, Bay of Bengal, India: taxonomy and distribution

The family Lutjanidae, commonly called “Snappers,” is a large, commercially important, and highly diverse clade of bony fishes with 17 genera and 113 species of order Perciformes. They primarily inhabit the shallow coastal waters of tropical oceans, including rocky and coral reefs, and are characterized by their colorful body patterns, which place them in the aquarium trade category. The diversity of snapper species in the Bay of Bengal is profoundly influenced mainly due to overfishing for high commercial trade. The phylogenetic relationship among snapper species is poorly understood, especially from the Bay of Bengal, and remains a topic of intense interest with conflicting morphological topologies and predominantly molecular data. In this study, we integrate two mitochondrial markers (COI and 16S rRNA) and morphological characteristics to explore the phylogenetic relationships, species diversification, and biogeographical history of the family Lutjanidae at the generic level. We collected 12 species among two genera: Lutjanus Bloch, 1790 and Pinjalo Bleeker, 1873 from the Odisha coast, Bay of Bengal, India. Phylogenetic analyses by both neighbor-joining (NJ) and maximum likelihood (ML) produce high congruence trees defining well-supported clades. In addition to phylogenetic analyses, the divergence time was based on RelTime-ML and Bayesian phylogeography approaches. Our results suggest that the studied snapper species were diversified from the common ancestor in the middle Paleogene period (42 Mya). Biogeographical reconstruction resulted in successive dispersal events from an ancestral range from the Indo-Pacific region to the eastern Pacific and to the Bay of Bengal. We believe that our results critically explain the origin of snapper species, their diversification, and their local distribution.