Short Communication
Jihoon Jo ,Chunsik Park ,Mu
Abstract
The economic value of Apostichopus japonicus products is primarily determined by their dorsal/ventral color variation (red, green, or black), yet the taxonomic relationships between these color variants are not clearly understood. By performing numerous phylogenetic analyses of the Stichopodidae family, based on nucleotide sequence comparisons of the cytochrome c oxidase subunit 1 (COI) and 16S rRNA gene sequences, we observed that these three color variants exhibit very low levels of sequence divergence and are not monophyletic. In this paper, we propose that the different dorsal/ventral color types of A. japonicus belong to a single species.