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Population genetic structure and historical population dynamics of the South American sea lion, Otaria flavescens, in north-central Patagonia

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Abstract

The north-central Patagonian coast is the sea lions most abundant area in Argentina. As occurs along the entire Atlantic coast, the distribution of breeding colonies at this smaller geographical scale is also patchy, showing at least three areas with breeding activity. We study the genetic structure and historical population dynamics of the species in five colonies in this area, analysing a 508 base-pair segment of the D-loop control region. Otaria flavescens showed 10 haplotypes with 12 polymorphic sites. The genealogical relationship between haplotypes revealed a shallow pattern of phylogeographic structure. The analysis of molecular variance showed significant differences between colonies, however, pairwise comparisons only indicate significant differences between a pair of colonies belonging to different breeding areas. The pattern of haplotype differentiation and the mismatch distribution analysis suggest a possible bottleneck that would have occurred 64,000 years ago, followed by a demographic expansion of the three southernmost colonies. Thus, the historical population dynamics of O. flavescens in north-central Patagonia appears to be closely related with the dynamics of the Late Pleistocene glaciations.

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Acknowledgments

We thank José Saravia, Enrique Crespo, Fabián Pérez, Jorge O. Owen, Hugo Gómez, Rudy Bernabeu, Flavio Quintana, Rodolfo Werner and Valeria Szapkievich who assisted us during the sample collection. We also specially thanks to Prof. Rasmus Nielsen, who helped us in the MDIV analysis, and the three anonymous reviewers for their useful comments. This work was supported by the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) (PIP-01556 and PIP-05489), the Department of Basic Sciences from the University of Lujan, and PROFAUNA organization. JIT was supported by a PhD grant from CONICET. MHC is a researcher of the CONICET.

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  1. Grupo de Estudios en Ecología de Mamíferos, DCB, Universidad Nacional de Luján and CONICET, Rutas 5 y 7 (6700), Luján, Provincia de Buenos Aires, Argentina

    Juan I. Túnez, Maximiliano Nardelli & Marcelo H. Cassini

  2. Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales “Bernardino Rivadavia” (MACN-CONICET), Av. Ángel Gallardo 470 (C1405DJR), Buenos Aires, Argentina

    Humberto L. Cappozzo

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  1. Juan I. Túnez
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  2. Humberto L. Cappozzo
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Correspondence to Juan I. Túnez.

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Túnez, J.I., Cappozzo, H.L., Nardelli, M. et al. Population genetic structure and historical population dynamics of the South American sea lion, Otaria flavescens, in north-central Patagonia. Genetica 138, 831–841 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10709-010-9466-8

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