Conservation Genetics and Phylogeography of the Threatened Corsican and Barbary Red Deer (Cervus elaphus corsicanus and C. e. barbarus)

Abstract

The two red deer subspecies C. e. corsicanus (Corsican red deer, endemic to the Tyrrhenian islands of Sardinia and Corsica) and C. e. barbarus (Barbary red deer, presently confined to a small area along the Tunisian-Algerian border) are classified by the IUCN as “Endangered” and “Lower risk (near threatened)”, respectively (until recently, the Barbary red deer’s status was “Vulnerable”). Both subspecies underwent severe bottlenecks in the twentieth century. We review our results on genetic variability and differentiation in these two subspecies at polymor­phic microsatellite loci and sequences of the mitochondrial control region and discuss their bearing on conservation and phylogeography. Our analyses yielded very low genetic variability for C. e. corsicanus. The Barbary red deer also showed low variability values in a European comparison, but diversity was not as low as might have been feared in the light of the population’s history. Analyses of molecular variance, assignment tests and factorial correspondence analysis did not yield any signs of differentiation among the Tunisian subgroups studied, whereas there was clear evidence of a differentiation between the Sardinian and the Corsican red deer population. The phylogeographic analysis showed close relationships between C. e. corsicanus and autochthonous Italian deer at two unlinked sets of nuclear loci, suggesting as the most likely scenario an introduction of Italian mainland red deer to the Tyrrhenian islands, from where animals were probably translocated to North-Africa.