Pet and turtle: DNA barcoding identified twelve Geoemydid species in northeast India

Geoemydid turtles are one of the most imperilled fauna on the planet, with nearly half of them are threatened with extinction due to bushmeat crisis, traditional medicine, and the illegal pet trade. Classical taxonomy often fails to identify the pet-kept turtle specimens due to amorphous form, unusual shell colouration owing to poor storage in captivity or intensely tinted for high demanding value. The DNA barcoding technique has evidenced as a supportive tool for accurate species identification in systematics research and discerned the nameless taxa in forensic sciences. We tested the effectiveness of DNA barcoding tools for identifying the pet-kept Geoemydid turtle in northeast India. The 36 generated sequences are readily delineated into 12 Geoemydid species using molecular data. The overall mean genetic distance of the studied Geoemydid turtles dataset is 15.3% and ranges from 3.4% to 22.6% between the species. The NJ, ML and Bayesian phylogeny also resulted monophyletic clustering and discriminated all the studied species. The present study contributes DNA barcode sequences of Geoemydid turtles in the global database and also affirms the on-going illegal pet trade of highly threatened species in northeast India.