Complete mitochondrial DNA genomes for two northeast Pacific mesopelagic fishes, the Mexican lampfish (Triphoturus mexicanus) and black-belly dragonfish (Stomias atriventer)

Abstract

Mesopelagic fishes are an important component of marine ecosystems, providing an important link between lower and higher trophic levels. This group of fishes are also highly abundant and make up a large portion of the marine vertebrate biomass. Here we report on the full mitochondrial sequences for two common mesopelagic fishes from the southern California bight: the Mexican lampfish Triphoturus mexicanus (Actinopterygii: Myctophidae) and the black-belly dragonfish Stomias atriventer (Actinopterygii: Stomiidae). T. mexicanus showed previously reported gene rearrangements for the Myctophidae. Phylogenetic analysis grouped S. atriventer with other Stomiiformes and T. mexicanus within the Myctophiformes.

Keywords: Myctophidae; Stomiidae; gene rearrangements; mesopelagic; mitogenome.

Figure 1.

Partitioned Bayesian phylogenetic tree of 3623 amino acid positions for 16 teleost species, T. mexicanus and S. atriventer are in boxes. Bayesian analysis was run over two chains for 5 × 10⁷ generations, sampling each chain every 10³ generations with MrBayes (Ronquist and Huelsenbeck 2003). The first 25% of sampled trees were discarded as burning and only posterior probabilities below 1.0 are shown. Genes and models of evolution for each partition are also reported. The MTMAM model of protein evolution (Cao et al. ; Yang et al. 1998) with gamma or gamma plus invariant sites was the best model for each respective partition based on BIC in PartitionFinder2. GenBank accession numbers are shown for additional species included in this analysis.