Abstract
Conservation geneticists have argued that evolutionarily significant units (ESUs) must be both genetically distinct and adaptively significant to be recognized for conservation protection. High-throughput DNA approaches can greatly increase the power to identify genetic distinctiveness, even if inferring adaptive significance remains a challenge. Here we present the first genomic evaluation of Lange’s metalmark, Apodemia mormo langei (Lepidoptera: Riodinidae), a U.S. federally endangered subspecies restricted to sand dune habitats in a single National Wildlife Refuge in California. Previous work based on very few genetic markers detected little genetic distinction for Lange’s metalmark. We use several thousand genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphisms to characterize the population structure of the A. mormo complex across California and determine if Lange’s metalmark qualifies as an ESU. We found that Lange’s metalmark is genetically identifiable, but is no more distinct than many other isolated populations across the study area. It remains unclear whether this genetic variation is adaptive, and so conservation efforts would benefit from more ecological characterization to determine conservation priorities.
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Acknowledgements
Funding was provided by a National Science and Engineering Research Council Discovery grant (RGPIN 217174) to FAHS. This research was enabled in part by support provided by WestGrid (http://www.westgrid.ca) and Compute Canada Calcul Canada (http://www.computecanada.ca). Availability of specimens of A. m. langei was made possible by funding for the captive propagation program from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s CVPIA Habitat Restoration Program. We thank Soowon Cho, John Eggers, Jerry Powell, and Dan Rubinoff for help collecting specimens, Kevin Muirhead for bioinformatic assistance, and Jim P. Brock for use of the A. m. langei photograph. We also thank Alfred Vogler and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on this manuscript. Data files are available as Online Resources (STRUCTURE input: Online Resource 3, ML input: Online Resource 4, SNAPP input: Online Resource 5) and raw sequence data are available as Sequence Read Archives (National Center for Biotechnology Information) under accession SRP127676 (SRR6427150-SRR6427258, BioProject PRJNA427807). Final figures generated using Inkscape v0.91 (The Inkscape Team 2017).
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Dupuis, J.R., Oliver, J.C., Brunet, B.M.T. et al. Genomic data indicate ubiquitous evolutionary distinctiveness among populations of California metalmark butterflies. Conserv Genet 19, 1097–1108 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10592-018-1081-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10592-018-1081-8