| Oysters are among the most familiar of all marine invertebrate taxa. However our knowledge of oyster phylogeny and systematics is fragmentary. This is principally due to the plastic growth patterns of these animals, which result in a wide range of overlapping, ecophenotypic variants that greatly reduce the value of analysis based on shell morphology. Besides that, many intentional or accidental anthropogenic transfers have emphasised this situation. In several cases of misclassification or misidentification of oysters, DNA molecular data, have provided valuable new insights on the tracing of introductions or more generally on the phylogeographic relationships between oyster species. We will illustrate this issue with recent case studies from our lab on... |
