Revista de filogenética y biología evolutiva

An Updated Multilocus Phylogeny of the Lumbricidae (Annelida: Clitellata: Oligochaeta) Earthworms

Abstract

Marcos Pérez-Losada, Jesse W Breinholt, Manuel Aira and Jorge Domínguez

Lumbricidae earthworms dominate agricultural lands and often natural terrestrial ecosystems in temperate regions in Europe. They impact soil properties and nutrient cycling, shaping plant community composition and aboveground food webs. The simplicity of the earthworm body plan has hampered morphology-based classifications and taxonomy; hence current research on Lumbricidae systematic relies mostly on molecular data from multiple or single locus [e.g., cytochrome oxidase subunit I (COI) barcodes] to infer evolutionary relationships, validate taxonomic groups and/or identify species. Here we use multiple nuclear and mitochondrial gene regions (including COI) to generate updated maximum likelihood and Bayesian phylogenies of the family Lumbricidae. We then compare these trees to new COI trees to assess the performance of COI at inferring lumbricid inter-generic relationships.