Abstract
Ancient DNA provides a powerful means to investigate the timing, rate and extent of population declines caused by extrinsic factors, such as past climate change and human activities. One species probably affected by both these factors is the arctic fox, which had a large distribution during the last glaciation that subsequently contracted at the start of the Holocene. More recently, the arctic fox population in Scandinavia went through a demographic bottleneck owing to human persecution. To investigate the consequences of these processes, we generated mitogenome sequences from a temporal dataset comprising Pleistocene, historical and modern arctic fox samples. We found no evidence that Pleistocene populations in mid-latitude Europe or Russia contributed to the present-day gene pool of the Scandinavian population, suggesting that postglacial climate warming led to local population extinctions. Furthermore, during the twentieth-century bottleneck in Scandinavia, at least half of the mitogenome haplotypes were lost, consistent with a 20-fold reduction in female effective population size. In conclusion, these results suggest that the arctic fox in mainland Western Europe has lost genetic diversity as a result of both past climate change and human persecution. Consequently, it might be particularly vulnerable to the future challenges posed by climate change.This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘The past is a foreign country: how much can the fossil record actually inform conservation?’
Highlights
The field of conservation biology can be divided into two major paradigms [1]
The small population paradigm, is concerned with the threats posed by small population size itself, such as genetic and demographic stochasticity
We investigated genetic variability in arctic foxes between time periods, using a median-joining network created in POPART 1.7 [35]
Summary
The field of conservation biology can be divided into two major paradigms [1]. One of these, the small population paradigm, is concerned with the threats. During the last 100 years, these have led to demographic bottlenecks and ensuing losses in genetic variation [12] One species that both contracted in range at the end of the last glaciation and has been affected by more recent human activities is the arctic fox (Vulpes lagopus). A better understanding of these past processes could help refine our ability to predict the impact of ongoing changes in climate and demographic bottlenecks To investigate these questions, we generated a temporally sampled mitogenomic dataset that spanned from the Late Pleistocene to the present day, and included samples from mid-latitude Europe, northeastern Russia and Scandinavia. We used seven summary statistics and estimated posterior parameter distributions by retaining the 10 000 datasets (1%) with the smallest Euclidean distances to the observed dataset
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