Genomic and fitness consequences of a near-extinction event in the northern elephant seal
Hoffman, Joseph I. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5895-8949; Vendrami, David L.J.; Hench, Kosmas; Chen, Rebecca S.; Stoffel, Martin A.; Kardos, Marty; Amos, William; Kalinowski, Joern; Rickert, Daniel; Koehrer, Karl. 2024 Genomic and fitness consequences of a near-extinction event in the northern elephant seal. Nature Ecology & Evolution. 33, pp. 10.1038/s41559-024-02533-2
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© The Author(s) 2024. Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. s41559-024-02533-2.pdf - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Download (9MB) | Preview |
Abstract/Summary
Understanding the genetic and fitness consequences of anthropogenic bottlenecks is crucial for biodiversity conservation. However, studies of bottlenecked populations combining genomic approaches with fitness data are rare. Theory predicts that severe bottlenecks deplete genetic diversity, exacerbate inbreeding depression and decrease population viability. However, actual outcomes are complex and depend on how a species' unique demography affects its genetic load. We used population genetic and veterinary pathology data, demographic modelling, whole-genome resequencing and forward genetic simulations to investigate the genomic and fitness consequences of a near-extinction event in the northern elephant seal. We found no evidence of inbreeding depression within the contemporary population for key fitness components, including body mass, blubber thickness and susceptibility to parasites and disease. However, we detected a genomic signature of a recent extreme bottleneck (effective population size = 6; 95% confidence interval = 5.0-7.5) that will have purged much of the genetic load, potentially leading to the lack of observed inbreeding depression in our study. Our results further suggest that deleterious genetic variation strongly impacted the post-bottleneck population dynamics of the northern elephant seal. Our study provides comprehensive empirical insights into the intricate dynamics underlying species-specific responses to anthropogenic bottlenecks.
Item Type: | Publication - Article |
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Digital Object Identifier (DOI): | 10.1038/s41559-024-02533-2 |
ISSN: | 2397-334X |
Date made live: | 11 Oct 2024 09:22 +0 (UTC) |
URI: | https://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/538217 |
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