Outside your shell: exploring genetic variation in two congeneric marine snails across a latitude and temperature gradient
Date
2025-05-15
Version
Published version
OA Version
Citation
D.M. Wuitchik, J.E. Fifer, A.K. Huzar, J.A. Pechenik, L.H. Uricchio, S.W. Davies. 2025. "Outside your shell: exploring genetic variation in two congeneric marine snails across a latitude and temperature gradient." BMC Genomics, Volume 26, Issue 1, pp.486-. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12864-025-11603-z
Abstract
Intertidal organisms withstand extreme temperature fluctuations, and theirability to cope with this variation may affect their distributions across the seascape. Genetic variation and local environments likely interact to determine variation in thermal performances across intertidal species' ranges, so characterizing the relationship between temperature variation and population structure is key to understanding the biology of marine invertebrates. Here, we use 2bRAD-sequencing to examine population genetic structure in two congeneric intertidal marine gastropods (Crepidula fornicata, C. plana), sampled from locations along a natural temperature gradient on the Northeast shores of the United States. These two species share similar life histories, yet C. plana exhibits a narrower distribution than C. fornicata. Our results demonstrate that both species show patterns of genetic divergence consistent with isolation by distance, though this pattern was only significant in C. fornicata. Both putatively selected and neutral loci displayed significant spatial structuring in C. fornicata; however, only putatively selected loci showed significant clustering in C. plana. When exploring whether temperature differences explained genetic differentiation, we found that 9-12% of genetic differentiation was explained by temperature variation in each species even when controlling for latitude and neutral population structure. Our results suggest that temperature shapes adaptive variation across the seascape in both Crepidula species and encourages further research to differentiate our results from models of neutral evolutionary drift.
Description
License
© The Author(s) 2025. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.