Biogeography in cellana (patellogastropoda, nacellidae) with special emphasis on the relationships of southern hemisphere oceanic island species

Abstract

© 2017 Liu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Oceanic islands lacking connections to other land are extremely isolated from sources of potential colonists and have acquired their biota mainly through dispersal from geographically distant areas. Hence, isolated island biota constitutes interesting models to infer biogeographical mechanisms of dispersal, colonization, differentiation, and speciation. Limpets of the genus Cellana (Nacellidae: Patellogastropoda) show limited dispersal capacity but are broadly distributed across the Indo-Pacific including many endemic species in isolated oceanic islands. Here, we examined main distributional patterns and geographic boundaries among Cellana lineages with special emphasis in the relationships of Southern Hemisphere oceanic islands species