Polystira

Todd, Jonathan A. & Rawlings, Timothy A., 2014, A review of the Polystira clade — the Neotropic’s largest marine gastropod radiation (Neogastropoda: Conoidea: Turridae sensu stricto), Zootaxa 3884 (5), pp. 445-491 : 448

Monophyly of Polystira

Recently a preliminary molecular phylogenetic analysis of the Turridae (s.s.) has been undertaken as part of a study to establish the major clades (families) within the Conoidea ( Puillandre et al. 2011a). This study analyzed portions of three mitochondrial genes (COI, 12S rRNA and 16S rRNA) for 102 genera of conoideans. However, only a single species exemplar was used for each genus, so for the Turridae (s.s.) just eight species and genera were analyzed. Maximum likelihood analyses of the concatenated dataset indicated the Turridae to be a well-supported clade with Polystira being the sister taxon to the rest of the clade as follows: ( Ptychosyrinx , ( Turridrupa , ( Lophiotoma , Gemmula ) ( Turris ( Xenuroturris, Ioturris )))) ( Puillandre et al. 2011a: fig 1). These relationships can only be considered to be robust for the species sampled; future analyses will require much more complete species sampling to fully establish intergeneric molecular relationships within the Turridae .

Our molecular phylogenetic analyses of the interspecific relationships of Polystira species uses the same gene fragments (COI, 12S and 16S) and reveals a strongly supported clade of Polystira to be monophyletic relative to a turrid (s.s.) outgroup comprising eight species of Gemmula, Ptychosyrin x, Turris , Xenuroturris and Unedogemmula . We discuss our analysis in ‘Current species diversity’ below.