Abstract
Global climate change is one of the major driving forces for adaptive shifts in migration and breeding phenology and possibly impacts demographic changes if a species fails to adapt sufficiently. In Western Europe, pied flycatchers (Ficedula hypoleuca) have insufficiently adapted their breeding phenology to the ongoing advance of food peaks within their breeding area and consequently suffered local population declines. We address the question whether this population decline led to a loss of genetic variation, using two neutral marker sets (mitochondrial control region and microsatellites), and one potentially selectively non-neutral marker (avian Clock gene). We report temporal changes in genetic diversity in extant populations and biological archives over more than a century, using samples from sites differing in the extent of climate change. Comparing genetic differentiation over this period revealed that only the recent Dutch population, which underwent population declines, showed slightly lower genetic variation than the historic Dutch population. As that loss of variation was only moderate and not observed in all markers, current gene flow across Western and Central European populations might have compensated local loss of variation over the last decades. A comparison of genetic differentiation in neutral loci versus the Clock gene locus provided evidence for stabilizing selection. Furthermore, in all genetic markers, we found a greater genetic differentiation in space than in time. This pattern suggests that local adaptation or historic processes might have a stronger effect on the population structure and genetic variation in the pied flycatcher than recent global climate changes.
Highlights
Global climate change has altered the phenology and distribution of many plant and animal species, resulting in mistiming such as disturbed ecological interactions across trophic levels
Ecology and Evolution published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd
For the period of 1940– 1979, control region sequences were recovered in 98% of all samples and at least eight microsatellite loci were successfully amplified in 74% of all cases
Summary
Global climate change has altered the phenology and distribution of many plant and animal species, resulting in mistiming such as disturbed ecological interactions across trophic levels (i.e., predator prey or host parasite relationships) (review e. g., Parmesan 2006; Gienapp et al 2008; Hansen et al 2012). We studied variation in selectively neutral mitochondrial and nuclear loci as well as one candidate gene in several current and historic European pied flycatcher populations, to test for potential effects of global climate change on the genetic architecture of populations. In order to control for the possible occurrence of single-base errors in PCR products from museum specimens (Sefc et al 2007), DNA was newly extracted from a set of 126 original samples and was re-analyzed via independent PCR and sequencing reactions The Clock gene locus of pied flycatchers was screened for length polymorphism by PCR amplification and electrophoresis using an automatic DNA sequencer. Associations between pairwise population differentiations (G′′ST) based on mitochondrial and microsatellite loci as well as microsatellite loci and the Clock gene locus were tested using a Mantel test (Peakall and Smouse 2006; GENALEX version 6 and 6.5)
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