Can mitochondrial DNA draw the phylogenetic picture of Central Mediterranean island Podarcisl

Five species of wall lizards (genus Podarcis) occur on the Central Mediterranean Islands of Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, the Malta Archipelago and surrounding islets: P. sicula (RAFINESQUE-SCHMALTZ, 1810) (Corsica, Sardinia and Sicily), P. tiliguerta (GMELIN, 1789) (Corsica and Sardinia), P. filfolensis (BEDRJAGA, 1876) (Malta Archipelago), P. wagleriana (GISTEL, 1868) (Sicily) and P. raffonei (MERTENS, 1952) (some islets in the Aeolian Archipelago). The specific status of the latter species was recently established on the basis of allozyme electrophoretic results comprising former subspecies of P. sicula and P. wagleriana (CAPULA 1994). Podarcis raffonei is obviously the sister species of P. wagleriana. Samples of all five species have been included in a phylogenetic analysis of the genus by OLIVERIO et al. (2000) based on mitochondrial 12SrRNA sequences. HARRIS & ARNOLD (1999) also published 12SrRNA sequences of Podarcis species occurring on Central Mediterranean islands (P. tiliguerta, P. filfolensis, P. sicula) but used a different part of the gene. Unfortunately, these two 12SrRNA segments overlap only about 70 bp. Hence, the results cannot be compared directly. In a paper on mitochondrial DNA data of P. tiliguerta accepted for publication and kindly provided by the authors, HARRIS et al. (2005) demonstrated high genetic divergence between the populations from Sardinia and Corsica and suspected that this species would represent a species complex. In the present paper sequences from a DNA segment covering both parts of the 12SrRNA gene (here refered to as 5'-section vs. 3'-section) of samples of all above species except P. raffonei are presented and compared separately with the data of both OLIVERIO et al. (2000) (data set I) and HARRIS & ARNOLD (1999) (data set II).