Can shell shape be used to find the origin of South American mussels?

TRIVELLINI, MARÍA MAGDALENA; VAN DER MOLEN, SILVINA; FILUN, LUIS; FEDERICO MÁRQUEZ,

MARINE BIOLOGY RESEARCH

TAYLOR & FRANCIS AS

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2021

1745-1000

AbstractIn the context of food sovereignty, it is essential to distinguish and give value tonational products, especially those from artisanal production. Argentina and Chilemussel production occurs at different scales (artisanal vs industrial), is targeted todifferent species and is developed in different environmental contexts, but in themarket the two products are labelled and offered as the same. We evaluated the useof the shell shape to distinguish between mussels from these two countries andamong crops, using Landmark-based geometric morphometrics. We comparedindividuals from five crops from Argentina and six from Chile to assess their shellshape variations using various multivariate statistical methods. Our results showedsignificant differences between the average shell shape from each country. Whilecrops from Argentina were different among themselves, the crops from Chile weresimilar. The misclassification rate, using the shell shape variables, betweencountries was lower than 3%. We hypothesize that the shell shape variations insidethe country reflect the environmental effect on the phenotype. Our results shownoticeable differences in the shell shape between South American mussels fromChile and Argentina, proving that the shell shape variation could be used as abiomarker to the designation of origin of the product.