Artemia

Eimanifar, Amin & Wink, Michael, 2013, Fine-scale population genetic structure in Artemia urmiana (Günther, 1890) based on mtDNA sequences and ISSR genomic fingerprinting, Organisms Diversity & Evolution (New York, N. Y.) 13 (4), pp. 531-543 : 531-532

Artemia (Crustacea, Anostraca ) —a cosmopolitan macrozooplankter—is a tiny nonselective filter-feeding

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s13127-013-0135-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

A. Eimanifar (*): M. Wink

Institute of Pharmacy and Molecular Biotechnology,

Heidelberg University, Im Neuenheimer Feld 364,

69120 Heidelberg, Germany e-mail: [e-mail] invertebrate that is highly adapted to hypersalinity. It occurs in over 600 locations across the world, except Antarctica ( Van Stappen 2002). The genus Artemia includes seven sexual species and a parthenogenetic species complex, A. parthenogenetica , whose species status is under discussion.

Five sexual species are found in Eurasia including A. salina in the Mediterranean basin ( Triantaphyllidis et al. 1997), A. urmiana ( Gunther 1890) in Lake Urmia ( Iran) and Lake Koyashskoe, Ukraine ( Abatzopoulos et al. 2009), A. sinica in Yuncheng Lake, China ( Cai 1989), A. tibetiana in Tibet ( Abatzopoulos et al. 1998), and an undescribed new species in Kazakhstan ( Pilla and Beardmore 1994). The other two species are A. franciscana ( Kellogg 1906) distributed throughout North and South America, and A. persimilis ( Piccinelli and Prosdocimi 1968) restricted to specific sites in Argentina and Chile.

Lake Urmia—the largest non-coastal thalassohaline lake in the Middle East—is close to the Turkish border and is the second largest permanent hypersaline lake in the world ( Karbassi et al. 2010). It is located on a semiarid plateau in north-western Iran (37°20′ E – 45°40′ N) at 1,278 m above sea level ( Hassanzadeh et al. 2012). Lake Urmia shows many similarities to the Great Salt Lake in Utah ( United States), including geographical topography, chemistry, and biological features ( Kelts and Shahrabi 1986; Eimanifar and Mohebbi 2007). Apparently, Lake Urmia was always hypersaline because it collects water from rivers but has no outlet to other areas ( Kelts and Shahrabi 1986). Within the lake, there are 102 islands, and its water hosts diverse bacterial communities, hyperhalophilous phytoplankton, and notably the almost endemic brine shrimp A. urmiana . The lake is an international park and protected biosphere reserve as recognized by the United Nations.

Before 1995, Lake Urmia had a surface area of 5,000 – 6,000 km 2 (140× 40–55 km; water depth 16 m). Annual average precipitation was 246 mm, average temperature 9.4 °C, and water salinity 140–220 g /l ( Manaffar et al. 2011; Delju et al. 2013; Hassanzadeh et al. 2012). Between 1997 and 2006, annual precipitation dropped to 204 mm and mean annual temperatures increased by 17 % ( Hassanzadeh et al. 2012). The progressing drought has caused fundamental changes in the physiochemical composition of the lake: currently the salinity exceeds> 300 g /l. The surface area has decreased to less than 2,366 km 2 and water volume was reduced from 42 billion m 3 in 1995 to 22 billion m 3 in 2010 ( Hoseinpour et al. 2010; Manaffar et al. 2011; Pengra 2012).

Artemia cyst production in the top 50 cm of the lake has been estimated at 4,243 to 4,536 t /year for 1995 ( Asem et al. 2012). A considerable decline in cyst concentrations from 399 cysts/l in 1995 to 3 cysts/l in 2007 has been recorded; currently less than 1 cyst/l are assumed ( Manaffar et al. 2011; Asem et al. 2012). Consequently, these alterations are already threatening the survival of fauna and flora. Eventually, A. urmiana will be driven to local extinction if the present conditions continue to reduce population densities even further.

So far, the genetic variability and population structure of A. urmiana in its main area, Lake Urmia, are hardly known. This is due partly to insufficient sampling from different regions of the lake. For A. urmiana , emphasis had been placed on morphological and initial genetic (RFLP) studies to infer population structure and geographical variability ( Eimanifar et al. 2006; Asem et al. 2007, 2010).

In this study, A. urmiana was collected systematically from 15 representative sampling sites of Lake Urmia in order to determine its population structure and genetic variability. The mitochondrial COI (mtDNA cytochrome c oxidase subunit I) gene was sequenced and inter-simple sequence repeats (ISSR)-PCR fingerprinting was carried out to assess genomic variability and phylogeographic structure.