Abstract
Tropical landscapes are rapidly changing due to deforestation and agricultural expansion, entailing the loss and fragmentation of natural habitats. Understanding how these changes affect the genetic diversity and gene flow in key native pollinators is of great importance to assure their survival and provision of pollination services. In this context, we studied how landscape features influence genetic diversity and gene flow in one of the most widespread species of stingless bees in the Neotropical region, Tetragonisca angustula. We evaluated bees from 46 nests sampled across forested, agricultural and urban landscapes within the Atlantic Forest, genotyped at 745 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). We found that forest cover negatively influenced the heterozygosity at a 500-m scale, although inbreeding and gene flow were not influenced by landscape features. Gene flow was explained mainly by geographic distance, indicating that T. angustula can disperse across heterogeneous and human-altered landscapes.
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Acknowledgements
We are thankful to Roberto Gaioski Jr. and Rafael S. C. Alves for the assistance during fieldwork, Eduardo A. B. Almeida (USP) for bee identification, Carlos Batista and Aline Moraes for help in the laboratory, and José B. Pinheiro (USP) and Anete P. Souza (UNICAMP) for allowing us to use their laboratory facilities. We are also very grateful to the private property owners for allowing us to sample bees on their land. Work was carried out under permit number 48402/1 (SISBIO) from the Brazilian Ministry of Environment.
Funding
This study was supported by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior, Brazil (CAPES, Finance Code 001 to MMB, and grant number 88887.156652/2017–00 to CCS), Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo - FAPESP (processes #2013/50421-2; #2020/01779-5; #2021/08534-0; #2021/10195-0), National Council for Scientific and Technological Development - CNPq (processes #442147/2020-1; #402765/2021-4; #313016/2021-6), and Associação Brasileira de Estudo das Abelhas (A.B.E.L.H.A.) to DAA.
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Conceptualization: MMB, MCR, DAA; Investigation & Data curation: MMB; Formal analysis: MMB, RJ, CSC, ECML, AAP; Methodology: MMB, MCR, ASC; Funding acquisition: MCR, DAA; Resources: MIZ, ASC, VLIF; Supervision: DAA; Writing—original draft: MMB, DAA; Review & editing: MMB, RJ, CSC, ECML, AAP, MIZ, ASC, MCR, VLIF, DAA.
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de Matos Barbosa, M., Jaffé, R., Carvalho, C.S. et al. Landscape influences genetic diversity but does not limit gene flow in a Neotropical pollinator. Apidologie 53, 48 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13592-022-00955-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13592-022-00955-0
Keywords
- landscape genetics
- SNPs
- rainforest
- stingless bees
- Tetragonisca angustula