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Conservation genetics of Blanding’s turtle and its application in the identification of evolutionarily significant units

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Abstract

Blanding’s turtle is a North American freshwater turtle whose main range occurs south of the Great Lakes; disjunct populations occur east of the Appalachian Mountains from New York to Nova Scotia. The species is listed as threatened or endangered in most of its range. We employed five variable microsatellites to examine samples of 300 individuals in 12 populations. Estimates of F ST based on pairwise comparisons of populations ranged from 0.000 to 0.465. Phylogenetic analysis of these F ST values reveals that the Appalachian Mountains and the Hudson River appear to present major barriers to gene flow in Blanding’s turtle. The extent of fine-scale genetic structure previously reported in the Nova Scotian populations was not found in other parts of the species’ range. We recommend that populations separated by the Appalachian Mountains as well as the highly disjunct Nova Scotian populations of Blanding’s turtle be recognized as evolutionarily significant units.

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Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) for grants to JMW and for scholarship support to SWM, and Parks Canada, the Endangered Species Research Fund and Acadia University for funding for this project. We thank Gary Caspers, John Moriarty, Brian Butler, Justin Congdon, Jeff Lang, Matt Osentoski, Erik Kiviat, Stacey Thew, Corey Rubin, Kejimkujik National Park and St Lawrence Islands National Park for providing samples. We also thank Sara Good-Avila for valuable comments on this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biology, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada

    S. W. Mockford & J. M. Wright

  2. Biology Department, Acadia University, 24 University Avenue, Wolfville, NS, B4P 2R6, Canada

    T. B. Herman & M. Snyder

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  1. S. W. Mockford
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  2. T. B. Herman
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Correspondence to T. B. Herman.

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Mockford, S.W., Herman, T.B., Snyder, M. et al. Conservation genetics of Blanding’s turtle and its application in the identification of evolutionarily significant units. Conserv Genet 8, 209–219 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10592-006-9163-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10592-006-9163-4

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