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Croatia is situated in the south-east Europe on the western part of the Balkan Peninsula known as one of the major European refugial areas. Due to its position, Croatia encompasses four different biogeographical regions, and the past geological and climatic events created rich and diverse hydrology within the country. All that enabled continuous evolution and diversification of abundant freshwater fauna, including freshwater crayfish. Nowadays, four native European crayfish species, presented by divergent lineages, are distributed in Croatia. Three of them, namely the stone crayfish, white-clawed crayfish and noble crayfish, are endangered and protected by national and international legislation. The aim of this work is to show genetic diversity of the native crayfish species in the Croatian freshwaters. For that purpose, we overlapped diversity of different crayfish species haplotypes, obtained through DNA barcoding, with the map of Croatia, in the GIS programme package. Overall, 525 sequences were obtained: 118 for the stone crayfish (45 unique COI haplotypes), 274 for the noble crayfish (16 unique COI haplotypes), 96 for white-clawed crayfish (28 unique COI haplotypes) and 37 for narrow-clawed crayfish (23 unique COI haplotypes). The highest diversity for the stone crayfish was revealed in the Alpine biogeographical region, while the Continental biogeographical region hosts the highest diversity of the noble crayfish, and the Mediterranean region of the whiteclawed crayfish. Obtained results will serve, in combination with data from population genetics and species distribution modelling (useful for revealing the impact of ongoing climate change), as a basis for conservation of these endangered crayfish species. |
