Abstract
The distribution of many species is fragmented due to human activities and isolated populations are often affected by genetic changes. Small populations are endangered by inbreeding depression, often leading to a low mean fitness of small populations and to an increased extinction risk. Using museum samples of protected Microtus oeconomus mehelyi from the years 1950, 1964 and 2000, we studied the population which inhabits the Kis Balaton area that has considerably changed by human activity in the last centuries. The detected effective population size, differences in allele frequencies, associations between alleles and a high genetic differentiation may be explained by 50 years of random genetic drift in this population in the significantly altered Kis Balaton area. We have detected a genetic difference between Kis Balaton populations and published populations from Hungary, Austria and Slovakia. Using linkage disequilibrium and temporal approaches, the estimates of the effective population size are below 100/1000, thresholds to limit inbreeding depression and to retain evolutionary potential. Taking the fragmented occurrence of Microtus oeconomus mehelyi in central Europe into account, it is possible that also other populations may also undergo the same processes after significant isolation.
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Microtus oeconomus genotypes are available on Mendeley Data, V1, https://doi.org/10.17632/yx2zmhmxkc.1, Microtus oeconomus samples are in the Hungarian Natural History Museum.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Virág Krízsik, Mária Tuschek, Tamás Görföl and Dick Bekker. The research was supported by the Synthesys project HU-TAF-5271 http://www.synthesys.info/ which is financed by European Community Research Infrastructure Action under the FP7 “Capacities” Program Part of the calculations were performed in the Computing Centre of the Slovak Academy of Sciences using the supercomputing infrastructure acquired in project ITMS 26230120002 and 26210120002 (Slovak infrastructure for high-performance computing) supported by the Research & Development Operational Programme funded by the ERDF.
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VS—designed and performed research, analyzed data, wrote the paper. DŽ—collected samples. PM—collected samples. AG—collected samples. GH—collected samples.
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Sládkovičová, V., Žiak, D., Miklós, P. et al. The history of genetic diversity and effective population size of an isolated Microtus oeconomus population on Kis Balaton. Mamm Biol 102, 87–98 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42991-021-00199-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42991-021-00199-y