Abstract
Determining the ‘dynamic biogeography’ of range collapse in threatened species is essential for effective conservation, but reconstruction of spatio-temporal patterns of population vulnerability and resilience can require use of non-standard ecological data such as historical archives. Père David's deer or milu, one of the few living mammal species that has become extinct in the wild, is historically known only from a small captive herd of unknown provenance that survived until 1900 in the Imperial Hunting Park near Beijing, from which all living individuals are descended. Using ancient DNA analysis, we demonstrate that two fawns collected in 1868 from Hainan Island, off the southern Chinese mainland, represent the only known wild milu specimens and were sampled from probably the last wild population. The Hainan milu population shows extremely low genetic differentiation from descendants of the Beijing herd, suggesting that this now-extinct population may have been the source of the captive herd. This revised extinction model refutes the supposed long-term survival of a captive milu herd for centuries or millennia after final extinction of wild populations, highlighting the vulnerability of remnant mammal populations in the absence of proactive management and the importance of historical museum collections for providing unique new insights on evolution, biogeography and conservation. Milu experienced a pattern of final population persistence on an island at the periphery of their former range, consistent with the ‘range eclipse’ or ‘contagion’ model of range collapse, and matching the spatial extinction dynamics of other extinct mammals such as the thylacine and woolly mammoth.
Highlights
Understanding the spatio-temporal pattern of population decline and persistence in threatened species is a key step to identify environmental conditions associated with vulnerability or resilience to anthropogenic threat factors, and to inform effective conservation [1,2,3,4]
Using ancient DNA analysis, we demonstrate that two fawns collected in 1868 from Hainan Island, off the southern Chinese mainland, represent the only known wild milu specimens and were sampled from probably the last wild population
DNA sequenced from Natural History Museum (NHM) 70.2.10.28 and NHM 70.2.10.29 were initially aligned to a reference mitochondrial genome for P. eldii
Summary
Understanding the spatio-temporal pattern of population decline and persistence in threatened species is a key step to identify environmental conditions associated with vulnerability or resilience to anthropogenic threat factors, and to inform effective conservation [1,2,3,4]. Extinction events may take decades, centuries or longer to run their course, and so developing a robust evidencebase on the ‘dynamic biogeography’ of range collapse may necessitate incorporating novel data from long-term historical archives as well as recent ecosystems, to avoid incomplete or biased reconstruction of past distributions and ecological requirements for threatened species [5,6]. This approach is important for species reduced to tiny remnant populations or that are already extinct in the wild, which have current-day geographical distributions that lack a true evolutionary or ecological basis due to disruption by human activity. The first captive animals were returned to China in 1956, and the Chinese population stands at over 2000 individuals [10]
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