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

ABSTRACT

In the context of food sovereignty, it is essential to distinguish and give value to national products, especially those from artisanal production. Argentina and Chile mussel production occurs at different scales (artisanal vs industrial), is targeted to different species and is developed in different environmental contexts, but in the market the two products are labelled and offered as the same. We evaluated the use of the shell shape to distinguish between mussels from these two countries and among crops, using Landmark-based geometric morphometrics. We compared individuals from five crops from Argentina and six from Chile to assess their shell shape variations using various multivariate statistical methods. Our results showed significant differences between the average shell shape from each country. While crops from Argentina were different among themselves, the crops from Chile were similar. The misclassification rate, using the shell shape variables, between countries was lower than 3%. We hypothesize that the shell shape variations inside the country reflect the environmental effect on the phenotype. Our results show noticeable differences in the shell shape between South American mussels from Chile and Argentina, proving that the shell shape variation could be used as a biomarker to the designation of origin of the product.

KEYWORDS:

• Mussels
• Mytilus edulis
• Mytilus chilensis
• landmark-based method
• designation of origin
• food sovereignty

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the staff of School n°721 from Bahía Camarones and School n° 704 from Comodoro Rivadavia, Stephane Sorroche (from Granja Marina San Julian), and Hernán Marraco (from Agencia Comodoro Conocimiento), for supporting the sampling in their places. Also, we want to acknowledge Dr Janet R Voight and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was y supported by PIP 1122015 0100241 CO, CIUMPAT No. 2015. RES. R/8, PICT 2018-3197(FM); Agencia Nacional de Promoción Científica y Tecnológica; Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Universidad Nacional de la Patagonia San Juan Bosco.