1. Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Naos Marine Laboratory, Box 2072, Balboa, Republic of Panama
2. Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093-0202, USA
3. Department of Geoscience, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa 52242, USA
4. Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida 32611-7800, USA
5. Department of Genetics, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil
6. Institute of Zoology, Academia Sinica, Nankang, Taipei 115, Taiwan
7. Akajima Marine Science Laboratory, Zamami-son, Okinawa 901-3311, Japan

Correspondence to: Nancy Knowlton^1,2 Email: nknowlton@ucsd.edu
DNA sequences are available in DDBJ (accession numbers AB117222–AB117388 and AB118246–AB118435).

Abstract

Only 17% of 111 reef-building coral genera and none of the 18 coral families with reef-builders are considered endemic to the Atlantic, whereas the corresponding percentages for the Indo-west Pacific are 76% and 39%^{1, 2}. These figures depend on the assumption that genera and families spanning the two provinces belong to the same lineages (that is, they are monophyletic). Here we show that this assumption is incorrect on the basis of analyses of mitochondrial and nuclear genes. Pervasive morphological convergence at the family level has obscured the evolutionary distinctiveness of Atlantic corals. Some Atlantic genera conventionally assigned to different families are more closely related to each other than they are to their respective Pacific 'congeners'. Nine of the 27 genera of reef-building Atlantic corals belong to this previously unrecognized lineage, which probably diverged over 34 million years ago. Although Pacific reefs have larger numbers of more narrowly distributed species, and therefore rank higher in biodiversity hotspot analyses³, the deep evolutionary distinctiveness of many Atlantic corals should also be considered when setting conservation priorities.

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