Identifying Coral Reef Fish Larvae Through DNA Barcoding: a Test Case with the Families Acanthuridae and Holocentridae

A reference collection of COI barcode (650 bp) for the Pacific Society Islands has been constituted for 22 species of Acanthuridae and 16 species of Holocentridae. Divergence between congeneric species was on average 20-fold to 87-fold higher than divergence between conspecific sequences and this set of DNA-identifiers was used to identify 40 larvae of both families. All larvae sequenced could be identified to species using DNA-barcodes. Pools of larvae constitute multi-specific assemblages and no additional species compared to adult reef communities were sampled in larval pools, suggesting that the larval assemblages originated from adult communities on neighboring reefs.