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Cavill, Emily L., Morales, Hernán E., Sun, Xin, Westbury, Michael V., van Oosterhout, Cock 
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5653-738X, Accouche, Wilna, Zora, Anna, Schulze, Melissa J., Shah, Nirmal, Adam, Pierre André, Brooke, M. de L., Sweet, Paul, Gopalakrishnan, Shyam and Gilbert, M. Thomas P.
(2024)
When birds of a feather flock together: Severe genomic erosion and the implications for genetic rescue in an endangered island passerine.
Evolutionary Applications, 17 (7).
ISSN 1752-4563
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Abstract
The Seychelles magpie-robin's (SMR) five island populations exhibit some of the lowest recorded levels of genetic diversity among endangered birds, and high levels of inbreeding. These populations collapsed during the 20th century, and the species was listed as Critically Endangered in the IUCN Red List in 1994. An assisted translocation-for-recovery program initiated in the 1990s increased the number of mature individuals, resulting in its downlisting to Endangered in 2005. Here, we explore the temporal genomic erosion of the SMR based on a dataset of 201 re-sequenced whole genomes that span the past ~150 years. Our sample set includes individuals that predate the bottleneck by up to 100 years, as well as individuals from contemporary populations established during the species recovery program. Despite the SMR's recent demographic recovery, our data reveal a marked increase in both the genetic load and realized load in the extant populations when compared to the historical samples. Conservation management may have reduced the intensity of selection by increasing juvenile survival and relaxing intraspecific competition between individuals, resulting in the accumulation of loss-of-function mutations (i.e. severely deleterious variants) in the rapidly recovering population. In addition, we found a 3-fold decrease in genetic diversity between temporal samples. While the low genetic diversity in modern populations may limit the species' adaptability to future environmental changes, future conservation efforts (including IUCN assessments) may also need to assess the threats posed by their high genetic load. Our computer simulations highlight the value of translocations for genetic rescue and show how this could halt genomic erosion in threatened species such as the SMR.
| Item Type: | Article |
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| Additional Information: | Acknowledgements: ELC would like to thank the S.M.A.R.T. co-ordinator, Chris Tagg, for the ongoing support offered throughout this research, and for the encouragement and enthusiasm shown towards using conservation genomics to manage our magpie-robins. We extend these thanks to past and present island conservation staff who collected and cared for the magpie-robins and the samples. We are hugely grateful to Ashley Dias and Kevin Moumou at the Seychelles Ministry of Climate Change, Agriculture and Environment for facilitating all necessary export permits for tissue samples, past and present. We also thank Mandy Bolt Botnen and Daniel Bilyeli \u00D8ksnebjerg at the Globe Institute, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, for facilitating permits for the import of avian samples into Denmark. We would like to thank the following people and institutions for their donation of museum tissue that made this research possible: Kristof Zyskowski of the Yale Peabody Museum; Thomas Trombone and Peter Campainolo of the American Museum of Natural History; Jerome Fuchs of the Paris Natural History Museum; Mark Adams and Hein Van Grouw of the London Natural History Museum; Christopher Milensky and Jacob Saucier of the Smithsonian Institute; Breda Zimkus and Jeremiah Trimble of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology and the team at Museum of Zoology, Cambridge University. ELC would also like to thank Josefin Stiller for help navigating the B10K data. This work was funded by the Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF143). |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | avian conservation,endangered species,genetic bottleneck,genetic rescue,genomic erosion,museomics,ecology, evolution, behavior and systematics,genetics,agricultural and biological sciences(all) ,/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/1100/1105 |
| Faculty \ School: | Faculty of Science > School of Environmental Sciences |
| UEA Research Groups: | Faculty of Science > Research Centres > Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Conservation |
| Related URLs: | |
| Depositing User: | LivePure Connector |
| Date Deposited: | 05 Sep 2024 09:34 |
| Last Modified: | 12 Nov 2024 14:30 |
| URI: | https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/96570 |
| DOI: | 10.1111/eva.13739 |
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