Maintenance of genetic diversity in cyclic populations—a longitudinal analysis in Myodes glareolus

Ecology and Evolution

Kaisa Rikalainen²  Jouni Aspi¹  Juan A. Galarza²  Esa Koskela² 

[1] Department of Biology, University of Oulu, P.O. Box 3000, FI-90014 Oulu, Finland;Department of Biological and Environmental Science, University of Jyväskylä, P.O. Box 35, FI-40014 Jyväskylä, Finland

关键词: Allelic richness;    effective population size;    genetic diversity;    Myodes glareolus;    private alleles;    rodent cycles;   

DOI  :  10.1002/ece3.277

来源: Wiley

【 摘 要 】

Abstract

Conspicuous cyclic changes in population density characterize many populations of small northern rodents. The extreme crashes in individual number are expected to reduce the amount of genetic variation within a population during the crash phases of the population cycle. By long-term monitoring of a bank vole (Myodes glareolus) population, we show that despite the substantial and repetitive crashes in the population size, high heterozygosity is maintained throughout the population cycle. The striking population density fluctuation in fact only slightly reduced the allelic richness of the population during the crash phases. Effective population sizes of vole populations remained also relatively high even during the crash phases. We further evaluated potential mechanisms contributing to the genetic diversity of the population and found that the peak phases are characterized by both a change in spatial pattern of individuals and a rapid accession of new alleles probably due to migration. We propose that these events act together in maintaining the high genetic diversity within cyclical populations.

【 授权许可】

CC BY-NC   
© 2011 The Authors. MicrobiologyOpen published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.