Demography and evolutionary history of grey wolf populations around the Bering Strait

Glacial and interglacial periods throughout the Pleistocene have been substantial drivers of change in species distributions. Earlier analyses suggested that modern grey wolves (Canis lupus) trace their origin to a single Late Pleistocene Beringian population that expanded east and westwards, starti...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Molecular ecology 2022-09, Vol.31 (18), p.4851-4865
Main Authors: Pacheco, Carolina, Stronen, Astrid Vik, Jędrzejewska, Bogumiła, Plis, Kamila, Okhlopkov, Innokentiy M., Mamaev, Nikolay V., Drovetski, Sergei V., Godinho, Raquel
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animal populations
Anthropogenic factors
Beringia
Canis lupus
Climate change
climatic fluctuations
Demographics
Demography
Flow distribution
Gene flow
Glacial periods
Human influences
Interglacial periods
Nucleotides
Pleistocene
Population decline
Population number
Populations
single nucleotide polymorphisms
Single-nucleotide polymorphism
Straits
Wolves
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Summary:Glacial and interglacial periods throughout the Pleistocene have been substantial drivers of change in species distributions. Earlier analyses suggested that modern grey wolves (Canis lupus) trace their origin to a single Late Pleistocene Beringian population that expanded east and westwards, starting c. 25,000 years ago (ya). Here, we examined the demographic and phylogeographic histories of extant populations around the Bering Strait with wolves from two inland regions of the Russian Far East (RFE) and one coastal and two inland regions of North‐western North America (NNA), genotyped for 91,327 single nucleotide polymorphisms. Our results indicated that RFE and NNA wolves had a common ancestry until c. 34,400 ya, suggesting that these populations started to diverge before the previously proposed expansion out of Beringia. Coastal and inland NNA populations diverged c. 16,000 ya, concordant with the minimum proposed date for the ecological viability of the migration route along the Pacific Northwest coast. Demographic reconstructions for inland RFE and NNA populations reveal spatial and temporal synchrony, with large historical effective population sizes that declined throughout the Pleistocene, possibly reflecting the influence of broadscale climatic changes across continents. In contrast, coastal NNA wolves displayed a consistently lower effective population size than the inland populations. Differences between the demographic history of inland and coastal wolves may have been driven by multiple ecological factors, including historical gene flow patterns, natural landscape fragmentation, and more recent anthropogenic disturbance.
ISSN:0962-1083
1365-294X
DOI:10.1111/mec.16613