Molecular Biology and Evolution, Vol 14, 355-362, Copyright © 1997 by Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution
E Valsecchi, P Palsboll, P Hale, D Glockner-Ferrari, M Ferrari, P Clapham, F Larsen, D Mattila, R Sears, J Sigurjonsson, M Brown, P Corkeron and B Amos
Mitochondrial DNA haplotypes of humpback whales show strong segregation
between oceanic populations and between feeding grounds within oceans, but
this highly structured pattern does not exclude the possibility of
extensive nuclear gene flow. Here we present allele frequency data for four
microsatellite loci typed across samples from four major oceanic regions:
the North Atlantic (two mitochondrially distinct populations), the North
Pacific, and two widely separated Antarctic regions, East Australia and the
Antarctic Peninsula. Allelic diversity is a little greater in the two
Antarctic samples, probably indicating historically greater population
sizes. Population subdivision was examined using a wide range of measures,
including Fst, various alternative forms of Slatkin's Rst, Goldstein and
colleagues' delta mu, and a Monte Carlo approximation to Fisher's exact
test. The exact test revealed significant heterogeneity in all but one of
the pairwise comparisons between geographically adjacent populations,
including the comparison between the two North Atlantic populations,
suggesting that gene flow between oceans is minimal and that dispersal
patterns may sometimes be restricted even in the absence of obvious
barriers, such as land masses, warm water belts, and antitropical migration
behavior. The only comparison where heterogeneity was not detected was the
one between the two Antarctic population samples. It is unclear whether
failure to find a difference here reflects gene flow between the regions or
merely lack of statistical power arising from the small size of the
Antarctic Peninsula sample. Our comparison between measures of population
subdivision revealed major discrepancies between methods, with little
agreement about which populations were most and least separated. We suggest
that unbiased Rst (URst, see Goodman 1995) is currently the most reliable
statistic, probably because, unlike the other methods, it allows for
unequal sample sizes. However, in view of the fact that these alternative
measures often contradict one another, we urge caution in the use of
microsatellite data to quantify genetic distance.
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Microsatellite genetic distances between oceanic populations of the humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae)
Department of Zoology, Cambridge University, UK.
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