Abstract
Five subspecies occur: R. t. tarandusLinnaeus, 1758 (European part of Russia excluding Ural Mountains); R. t. pearsoniLydekker, 1902 (Novaya Zemlya Archipelago); R. t. sibiricusMurray, 1886 (Siberian tundra and Arctic Ocean islands); R. t. valentinaeFlerov, 1933 (forest zone of Siberia, in the east up to Stanovoy Range, S Siberian Mountains, Altai); R. t. phylarchusHollister, 1912 (Kamchatka Peninsula, regions adjoining the Sea of Okhotsk, Amur region) (Heptner 1989). Despite the fact that wild and tame reindeer populations live in the same area and there is an exchange of some individuals, Shubin and Ionova (1984) and Shubin and Ephimtseva (1988) found rather different frequencies of alleles in two loci. They concluded that the two forms evolved separately. In Novaya Zemlya, among 6,000 reindeer living on these islands, in 1986, 10% demonstrated color features of tame reindeer, as a result of hybridization since 1928–1933, when 604 tame reindeer were acclimatized there (Zubkov 1935; Novikov 1983a; Kupriyanov and Belikov 1986; Khakhin 1998). Feral populations of reindeer inhabit the Wrangel Island, domestic reindeer from Chukchi Peninsula were introduced in 1948, and have become feral since 1972 (Baskin and Skogland 1997).
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