MOBULIDAE (DEVIL RAYS)

Henderson, Aaron C., Reeve, Alan J., Jabado, Rima W. & Naylor, Gavin J. P., 2016, Taxonomic assessment of sharks, rays and guitarfishes (Chondrichthyes: Elasmobranchii) from south-eastern Arabia, using the NADH dehydrogenase subunit 2 (NADH 2) gene, Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 176 (2), pp. 399-442 : 430

MOBULIDAE (DEVIL RAYS)

This family was represented by four species, which exhibited a between-group mean distance of 5.23 ± 0.43%. Mobula japanica and Mobula thurstoni formed distinct clusters, but M. kuhlii and M. eregoodootenke clustered together ( Fig. 2 ). The latter two species are morphologically distinct ( Fig. 7 ) but they exhibited a very low between-group mean distance ( Table 3). Naylor et al. (2012) did not include M. eregoodootenke in their study, but the M. kuhlii / M. eregoodootenke specimens from the present study clustered with their M. kuhlii specimens. The former two species clustered with the relevant taxa.

Figures

Figure 2. Neighbour-joining tree for an 829-bp fragment of the NADH2 gene from 1487 elasmobranch specimens from south-eastern Arabia. Values in parentheses indicate sample size (n) and within-group mean genetic distance (D). Bootstrap values are based on 1000 replications and only values ≥ 95% are shown.

Figure 7. Specimens of Mobula eregoodootenkee (top) and Mobula kuhlii (bottom) from Oman. Despite their genetic similarity, these species are morphologically distinguishable.