Abstract:
The New World jacanas, Jacana spinosa (Mexico to Panama and also the West Indies) and Jacana jacana (Panama and South America), are polyandrous freshwater waders that are common throughout the Neotropics. These two species hybridize narrowly at their contact zone in Panama, and as part of a study of the hybrid zone dynamics, we present complete, annotated mitochondrial genomes for both species. The two species have very similar mitochondrial genomes, showing identical gene orders, and differing in size in only two RNA features and the control region, and among protein-coding genes, the two genomes had average uncorrected pairwise divergence of 1.8%, ranging from 0.7% for ND4L and 3.6% for ATP8. However, control region divergence is high (~ 16%). These mitochondrial genome sequences may be useful tools for understanding jacana hybridization dynamics, especially regarding potential mitonuclear incompatibilities.
