The cynoglossid fishes are popular for food in the world including Korea, China and Japan, and among them, Paraplagusia japonica lives all over the sea of Korea. In order to establish appropriate management measure, it is essential to clarify populati...
The cynoglossid fishes are popular for food in the world including Korea, China and Japan, and among them, Paraplagusia japonica lives all over the sea of Korea. In order to establish appropriate management measure, it is essential to clarify population structure of P. japonica from the morphological and molecular perspectives. We collected a total of 132 individuals of P. japonica from six localities in Korea between 2008 and 2021. Canonical discriminant analysis results showed that the West Sea population (Incheon) slightly differed from the South (Tongyeong, Busan) and East Sea populations (Pohang, Donghae, Sokcho). Similar results were also shown in Kruskal-Wallis test of meristic characters. Furthermore, neighbor-joining and maximum-likelihood trees based on 849 base pairs of mitochondrial DNA cytochrome b sequences showed that P. japonica was divided into two lineages (designated as A and B) with a high significance (Φst=0.0781, P<0.001). Interestingly, however, the two lineages in the admixture area (South-East Sea) were not different in morphological characters. Our results suggest that P. japonica had undergone differentiated history during the Late Pleistocene, but secondary contact may occur at the admixture area.