Life Sciences Commons^™

Species delimitation using mitochondrial sequences aims to identify species as morphological expertise and biodiversity both decline. Species delimitation in animals relies completely or in part on 2 critera: genetic distance and reciprocal monophyly. Using coalescent simulations of populations experiencing continuous and interrupted gene flow we show that these commonly applied criteria incur both high false-positive and high false-negative error rates in species delimitation when dispersal is sex-biased, as it is in most mammals. The combination of distance- and topology-based critera will incur false-positive error rates well above 5% when ancestral effective population sizes are large and when population structure has …