A phylogenetic analysis of the isopod family Janiridae (Crustacea)

Abstract

A phylogeny of the isopod family Janiridae and genera from presumptive outgroups, Acanthaspidiidae, Joeropsididae and Microparasellidae is estimated. Characters were gathered from the published literature, and assembled into a data matrix for cladistic analysis. The data, when evaluated with heuristic search algorithms, yielded eight most-parsimonious trees, none of which supported the monophyly of the Janiridae. To evaluate the impact of homoplasy, characters with a rescaled consistency less than 0.1 were deleted, resulting in four somewhat different trees that were non-monophyletic for the janirids. With the smaller data set, trees supporting janirid monophyly were 10 steps longer. A permutation tail probability test found substantially more hierarchical information in the janirid data set than in randomised data. Internal topologies of the shortest trees were evaluated as hypotheses for new family-level groups, although new family-level classifications cannot be proposed at this time owing to insufficient evidence. The Janiridae therefore cannot be considered monophyletic.