Milnesium species diversity
The addition of new populations to the dataset resulted in a substantial
growth in the number of species analysed in this study. Specifically,
compared with the most recent Milnesium phylogeny (Morek &
Michalczyk, 2020), the number of populations increased from 34 to 127
(3.7 times), the number of delineated species raised from 25 to 64 (2.5
times), and the number of species represented by single population
decreased (from 84% to 56%). Although species delineation in this
study is preliminary and taxonomic identity of the analysed populations
requires further investigation, including a detailed morphological and
ontogenetic analyses, the 49 identified putative unknown species
constitute a greater number than the number of the currently described
species in the genus Milnesium (i.e. 43; Morek et al., 2020b).
This explicitly demonstrates that that species diversity in this genus
is grossly underestimated, indicating that there are hundreds rather
than tens of extant Milnesium species. This prediction, combined
with the apparent limited geographic ranges of the majority of apochelan
species, suggests that each survey of any given unexplored or poorly
investigated region will almost certainly uncover multiple new species,
provided the essential molecular tools are applied in tandem with
detailed morphological and ontogenetic analyses to provide the high
resolution of species delineation required in the taxonomy of the genus
(e.g. see Morek et al., 2016; Surmacz, Morek, & Michalczyk, 2019).