Phylogeny Of Sea Cucumbers Family Stichopodidae (Class Holothuroidea) Inferred From Morphological Characters

Abstract

Stichopodidae is one of the commercial holothuroid families and distributes widely in tropical shallow waters around the world. External and internal morphology as well as spicules are used to differentiate holothuroid species. However, these characters possessed high similarity among the Stichopodidae members. Evolution based on morphological characters can be used to determine the character states that subsequently applied in the phylogenetic analysis. However, the evolutions of those characters are still under debatable. Based on the previous phylogenetic studies, there is still no morphological study of Stichopodidae. Therefore, this study was conducted to describe the phylogenetic relationship of Stichopodidae, to determine plesiomorph, synapomorph, homoplasy and key characters of species from Stichopus and Thelenota (Stichopodidae). The specimens used in this study were derived from Oceanography Research Center-Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), collected from Indonesian shallow waters. They consisted of nine species from Family Stichopodidae (ingroup) and two species from Family Holothuriidae (outgroup). Maximum parsimony and PAUP 4.0b was applied to construct the phylogenetic tree based on 78 morphological characters. The result showed two phylogenetic trees which separate the genus of Stichopus and Thelenota into two consistent clades (bootstrap 99% and 100%, respectively). The species position of each genus was stable. The two genus from Stichopodidae had the same number of synapomorph characters, and four plesiomorph characters occurred in the family level. Stichopus had ten homoplasy characters, while Thelenota did not have this characters. Six of nine species had the autapomorph characters that was used in constructed the identification key of Stichopodidae.