UTTAR PRADESH JOURNAL OF ZOOLOGY

The current study was aimed to document the Fish faunal diversity and to estimate genetic divergence using Cytochrome oxidase I (COI) sequence data of fish fauna from lake Kolleru, the only RAMSAR site from Andhra Pradesh, India. A total of 258 specimens representing 45 species, 30 genera, 19 families, 11 orders were collected from five major sampling stations across the lake, i.e. Gundugolanu, Adavikolanu, Gudivakalanka, Kaikaluru and Akividu. Partial COI sequence data of 38 DNA barcodes belonging to 17 species were generated and used to investigate various parameters of genetic diversity including inter and intra-species divergence, haplotype diversity, and phylogenetic analysis using Kimura 2-paramter (K2P) method. All the results suggested that DNA barcoding is an efficient and reliable tool for species identification and to decipher the species boundaries. Most of the studied fish species exhibited threshold K2P sequence divergence for various hierarchical taxa. The haplotype diversity of the fish population was moderate to high which was accompanied by low nucleotide diversity indicates that haplotypes with close genetic relationships. The constructed Neighbor Joining tree with 1000 bootstrap replications was clearly showed species discrimination corresponding to their genera and families. However, presence of anomalous clustering at intraspecies level in two species, Anabas cobojius and Anguilla bicolor, revealed presence of putative cryptic species or erroneous sequence submissions. The current data on existing fish diversity and COI sequence data may serve as reference library that will help ichthyologists, researchers, biodiversity managers and policy makers in effective planning with regard to fishery conservation strategies.