Anemonefish are better taxonomists than humans.

Abstract

The symbiosis between giant sea anemones, photosynthetic algae of the family Symbiodiniaceae, and anemonefish is an iconic example of a mutualistic "menage a 3"1. Patterns of associations among 28 species of anemonefish and 10 species of giant sea anemone hosts are complex: Some anemonefish species are highly specialized to inhabit only one species of sea anemone (e.g., Amphiprion frenatus with Entacmaea quadricolor), whereas others are more generalist and can live in almost any host species (e.g., Amphiprion clarkii)1,2,3. Reasons for host preferences and the mechanisms involved are obscured, among other things, by the lack of resolution of giant sea anemone phylogeny. Recent molecular analyses have shown that giant sea anemones hosting anemonefish belong to three distinct clades: Entacmaea, Stichodactyla, and Heteractis4,5,6. Inside these clades, however, species delimitation has been impeded by morphological variability of the giant sea anemones and is poorly resolved with classical markers4,5. Here, we employed an extensive transcriptomic dataset from 55 sea anemones collected from southern Japan to build a robust phylogeny. With this dataset, we observed that the bubble-tip sea anemone E. quadricolor, currently considered to be a single species, can in fact be separated into at least four distinct cryptic lineages (A-D). Moreover, these lineages can be precisely distinguished by their association with anemonefish: A. frenatus is only found associated with lineage D, whereas A. clarkii lives in the other three lineages.