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Unprecedented long-term genetic monomorphism in an endangered relict butterfly species

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Abstract

Multi-locus monomorphism in microsatellites is practically non-existent, with one notable exception, the island fox (Urocyon littoralis dickeyi) population on San Nicolas island off the coast of southern California, having been called “the most monomorphic sexually reproducing animal population yet reported”. Here, we present the unprecedented long-term monomorphism in relict populations of the highly endangered Parnassius apollo butterfly, which is protected by CITES and classified as “threatened” by the IUCN. The species is disjunctly distributed throughout the western Palaearctic and has occurred in several small remnant populations outside its main distribution area. We screened 78 individuals from 1 such relict area (Mosel valley, Germany) at 16 allozyme and 6 microsatellite loci with the latter known to be polymorphic in this species elsewhere. From the same area, we also genotyped 55 museum specimens sampled from 1895 to 1989 to compare historical and present levels of genetic diversity. However, none of all these temporal populations yielded any polymorphism. Thus, present and historical butterflies were completely monomorphic for the same fixed allele. This is the second study to report multi-locus monomorphism for microsatellites in an animal population and the first one to prove this monomorphism not to be the consequence of recent factors. Possible explanations for our results are a very low long-term effective population size and/or a strong historic bottleneck or founder event. Since the studied population has just recovered from a recent population breakdown (second half of twentieth century) and no signs of inbreeding depression have been detected, natural selection might have purged the population of weakly deleterious alleles, thus rendering it less susceptible to the usual negative corollaries of high levels of homozygosity and low effective population size.

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Acknowledgments

We acknowledge a grant from the Ministère de la Culture, de l’Enseignement Superieur et de la Recherche, Luxembourg (grant number BFR05/118 Habel), the Musée national d’histoire naturelle Luxembourg and the DFG (grant number SCHM 1659/3-1 and 3–2) making this study possible. We thank the local authorities in Koblenz for giving us a sampling permit, H. Kinkler (Leverkusen, D), A. Schmidt (Koblenz, D) and M. Weitzel (Trier, D) for information about sample localities and the population dynamics and Marco Zimmermann (Bonn, D) for field assistance. We are grateful for samples from museum collections of the “Zentrum für Biodokumentation des Saarlandes” (Reden, Germany) and the Alexander-Koenig–Forschungsmuseum (Bonn, Germany).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Musée National d’histoire Naturelle, Section Zoologie des Invertébrés, 25, rue Münster, 2160, Luxembourg, Germany

    Jan Christian Habel, Aline Finger & Marc Meyer

  2. Biogeography, University Trier, 54296, Trier, Germany

    Jan Christian Habel, Aline Finger, Dirk Louy & Thomas Schmitt

  3. Zoological Institute, Christian-Albrechts-University Kiel, 24118, Kiel, Germany

    Frank Emmanuel Zachos

  4. ETH Zürich, ITES-Ecosystem Management, 8092, Zürich, Switzerland

    Aline Finger

  5. Institute of Ecology and Environmental Chemistry, Leuphana University Lueneburg, 21335, Lüneburg, Germany

    Thorsten Assmann

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  1. Jan Christian Habel
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  2. Frank Emmanuel Zachos
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  3. Aline Finger
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  4. Marc Meyer
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  7. Thomas Schmitt
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Correspondence to Jan Christian Habel.

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Habel, J.C., Zachos, F.E., Finger, A. et al. Unprecedented long-term genetic monomorphism in an endangered relict butterfly species. Conserv Genet 10, 1659–1665 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10592-008-9744-5

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