Founding in action: genetic assessment of new populations from the same reintroduction program
Anna
Barbanti1, 2,
Maria
Turmo1, 2,
Janice
Blumenthal3,
Jack
Boyle3,
Annette
C.
Broderick4,
Lucy
Collyer3,
Gina
Ebanks-Petrie3,
Brendan
J.
Godley4,
Marta
Pascual1, 2* and
Carlos
Carreras1, 2
-
1
Department of Genetics, Microbiology and Statistics, Faculty of Biology, University of Barcelona, Spain
-
2
Institut de Recerca de la Biodiversitat (IRBIO), Spain
-
3
Department of the Environment Cayman Islands, Cayman Islands
-
4
Centre for Ecology and Conservation, University of Exeter, United Kingdom
Changes in species distribution can be favoured by variations in environmental conditions. Anthropogenic actions such as global warming or human mediated dispersal are two of the main causes of the current founding of new populations worldwide. The establishment of new populations can be challenging to study in long living and highly migratory species. For this reason, reintroduction processes represent unique opportunities for tracking these evolutionary processes. The green turtle (Chelonia mydas) populations of Grand and Little Cayman were considered extinct in the 80s. During the last 20 years the number of nests in these two sites have been increasing progressively. A previous study (Barbanti et al 2019) has shown that most of the wild females captured in Grand Cayman were related to a reintroduction program that started in 1968 from captive breeding by the Cayman Turtle Center (CTC). This reintroduction offers the unique opportunity to study the rise of these new populations to have a better understanding on how the evolutionary forces determine diversity and differentiation on founding processes. We analysed 320 wild hatchlings sampled on Little and Grand Cayman in three consecutive nesting seasons using microsatellite and mtDNA D-Loop markers. We ran parentage and relatedness analysis against CTC breeding stock and wild females using previously genotyped data (Barbanti et al 2019). Both sites showed a high degree of relatedness to the CTC; 79% of Little Cayman hatchlings and 90% of Grand Cayman hatchlings were related to farm individuals. Despite this result, the two islands were found to be genetically different and both showed significant genetic differentiation from the CTC, when using nuclear markers. Only Little Cayman showed significant differentiation from the CTC using the mtDNA marker. Genetic drift, in fact, can be essential to determine genetic differentiation of population after only one generation. Moreover, we analysed nest site fidelity (NSF) of wild females by comparing geographic distances between each female’s consecutive nests within a season. Wild females showed high degree of nest site fidelity, although we found few individuals reproducing on both islands. Finally, we used parentage analysis to identify or infer the parental individuals of each nest and calculate the sex ratio of breeding adults. The sex ratio did not show any significant shifting towards one sex, meaning that global warming did not affect the developmental ratio of these adult populations, considering the Temperature-dependent Sex Determination of this species.
Acknowledgements
This research was funded by project PopCOmics (TM2017-88080) from the Spanish Government, by the Darwin Plus Project DPLUS019 "Socio‐economic aspects of turtle conservation in the Cayman Islands" funded through the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) in the UK and by the projects 9013 and 10084 of the Fundació Bosch I Gimpera‐UB. This is a contribution from the Consolidated Research Group “Benthic Biology and Ecology” SGR2017-1120 (Catalan Government).
References
Barbanti, Anna, Clara Martin, Janice M. Blumenthal, Jack Boyle, Annette C. Broderick, Lucy Collyer, Gina Ebanks-Petrie, Brendan J. Godley, Walter Mustin, Víctor Ordóñez, Marta Pascual, and Carlos Carreras. (2019). How Many Came Home? Evaluating Ex Situ Conservation of Green Turtles in the Cayman Islands. Molecular Ecology 28(7):1637–1651
Keywords:
Microsatellite (or short tandem repeat [STR]),
reintroduction assessment,
Chelonia mydas,
breeding structure,
Cayman Islands
Conference:
XX Iberian Symposium on Marine Biology Studies (SIEBM XX) , Braga, Portugal, 9 Sep - 12 Sep, 2019.
Presentation Type:
Poster Presentation
Topic:
Global Change, Invasive Species and Conservation
Citation:
Barbanti
A,
Turmo
M,
Blumenthal
J,
Boyle
J,
Broderick
AC,
Collyer
L,
Ebanks-Petrie
G,
Godley
BJ,
Pascual
M and
Carreras
C
(2019). Founding in action: genetic assessment of new populations from the same reintroduction program.
Front. Mar. Sci.
Conference Abstract:
XX Iberian Symposium on Marine Biology Studies (SIEBM XX) .
doi: 10.3389/conf.fmars.2019.08.00168
Copyright:
The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers.
They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters.
The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated.
Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed.
For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions.
Received:
14 May 2019;
Published Online:
27 Sep 2019.
*
Correspondence:
Mx. Marta Pascual, Department of Genetics, Microbiology and Statistics, Faculty of Biology, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, martapascual@ub.edu