ABSTRACT
India, South-East and East Asia harbour a high marine biodiversity, with a hotspot located between the Indo-Malayan and Philippines Archipelagos (IMPA). The origin of this biodiversity pattern is still debated, several hypotheses being advanced to explain this observation (Bellwood and Meyer 2009, Carpenter et al. 2011 and references therein). Among these hypotheses there are elevated local speciation rates (the centre of the origin hypothesis), a greater accumulation of species formed elsewhere (the centre of accumulation hypothesis), presence of refugia (the centre of endemism hypothesis) and the overlap of a distinct biogeographic ichthyofauna (the centre of overlap hypothesis) (Bellwood and Wainwright 2002, Mora et al. 2003, Barber et al. 2006, Bellwood and Meyer 2009, Carpenter et al. 2011, Hubert et al. 2012). In this context it is of prime importance to precisely depict the species diversity and its geographic distribution, since the quality of any biogeographic inferences are largely dependent on this knowledge. Unfortunately, recent phylogeographic molecular taxonomic investigations have shown that biodiversity is frequently underestimated and consequently species geographic distribution poorly evaluated (Zemlak et al. 2009, Carpenter et al. 2011, Hubert et al. 2012). This is especially true for species of the Mugilidae family since their conservative morphology and the paucity of useful taxonomic characters make taxonomy, biogeography and biological research challenging (Durand et al. 2012b). Recent genetic investigations (for a review see Chapter 2-Durand 2015 and Chapter 15-Rossi et al. 2015) may help solve questions of taxonomy and phylogenetics, and hence the biogeography of Mugilidae. This chapter reviews the diversity of Mugilidae species and their biogeography in India, South-East and East Asia.
