The conservation of large carnivores is a formidable challenge for biodiversity conservation. Using a data set on the past and current status of brown bears (Ursus arctos), Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx), gray wolves (Canis lupus), and wolverines (Gulo gulo) in European countries, we show that roughly one-third of mainland Europe hosts at least one large carnivore species, with stable or increasing abundance in most cases in 21st-century records. The reasons for this overall conservation success...

With climate warming, the ranges of many boreal species are expected to shift northward and to fragment in southern peripheral ranges. To understand the conservation implications of losing southern populations, we examined range-wide genetic diversity of the snowshoe hare (Lepus americanus), an important prey species that drives boreal ecosystem dynamics. We analysed microsatellite (8 loci) and mitochondrial DNA sequence (cytochrome b and control region) variation in almost 1000 snowshoe hares. A hierarchical structure analysis of...

Hybridization drives the evolutionary trajectory of many species or local populations, and assessing the geographic extent and genetic impact of interspecific gene flow may provide invaluable clues to understand population divergence or the adaptive relevance of admixture. In North America, hares (Lepus spp.) are key species for ecosystem dynamics and their evolutionary history may have been affected by hybridization. Here we reconstructed the speciation history of the three most widespread hares in North America -...

Selection due to social interactions comprises competition over matings (sexual selection stricto sensu) plus other forms of social competition and cooperation. Sexual selection explains sex differences in ornamentation and in various other phenotypes, but does not easily explain cases where those phenotypes are similar in males and females. Understanding such similarities requires knowing how phenotypes influence non-sexual social interactions as well, which can be very important in gregarious animals, but whose role for phenotypic evolution...

Drosophila (Drosophila) nigrosparsa is a habitat specialist restricted to the European montane/alpine zone (Bächli 2008). Mountain biodiversity is considered highly vulnerable to ongoing climate warming (IPCC 2013), and organisms at high altitudes have only limited possibility to shift to cooler habitats at elevations above (Pertoldi & Bach 2007). For such species, rapid evolution may offer a solution for long-term survival. We are establishing D. nigrosparsa as a model system to test the extent and tempo...

The clarification of the systematics of pikas (genus Ochotona) has been hindered by largely overlapping morphological characters among species and the lack of a comprehensive molecular phylogeny. Here we estimate the first multilocus phylogeny of the genus to date, by analysing 12 nuclear DNA markers (total of 7.5 Kb) in 11 species of pikas from the four classified subgenera (Pika, Ochotona, Lagotona and Conothoa) using a multispecies coalescent-based framework. The species-tree confirmed the subgeneric classification...

Although whole-genome sequencing is becoming more accessible and feasible for nonmodel organisms, microsatellites have remained the markers of choice for various population and conservation genetic studies. However, the criteria for choosing microsatellites are still controversial due to ascertainment bias that may be introduced into the genetic inference. An empirical study of red deer (Cervus elaphus) populations, in which cross-specific and species-specific microsatellites developed through pyrosequencing of enriched libraries, was performed for this study. Two different...

Two hypotheses have been proposed to explain the abundance-occupancy relationship (AOR) in parasites. The niche-breadth hypothesis suggests that host generalists are more abundant and efficient at colonizing different host communities than specialists. The trade-off hypothesis argues that host specialists achieve high density across their hosts’ ranges, whereas generalists incur the high cost of adaptation to diverse immuno-defense systems. We tested these hypotheses using 386 haemosporidian cytochrome-b lineages (1894 sequences) recovered from 2318 birds of 103...

While gene flow between distantly related populations is increasingly recognized as a potentially important source of adaptive genetic variation for humans, fully characterized examples are rare. In addition, the role that natural selection for resistance to vivax malaria may have played in the extreme distribution of the protective Duffy-null allele, which is nearly completely fixed in mainland sub-Saharan Africa and absent elsewhere, is controversial. We address both these issues by investigating the evolution of the...

Ancient oceanic archipelagos of similar geological age are expected to accrue comparable numbers of endemic lineages with identical life history strategies, especially if the islands exhibit analogous habitats. We tested this hypothesis using marine snails of the genus Conus from the Atlantic archipelagos of Cape Verde and Canary Islands. Together with Azores and Madeira, these archipelagos comprise the Macaronesia biogeographic region and differ remarkably in the diversity of this group. More than 50 endemic Conus...

Wolves and dogs provide a paradigmatic example of the ecological and conservation implications of hybridization events between wild and domesticated forms. However, our understanding of such implications has been traditionally hampered by both high genetic similarity and the difficulties in obtaining tissue samples (TS), which limit our ability to assess ongoing hybridization events. To assess the occurrence and extension of hybridization in a pack of wolf-dog hybrids in Northwestern Iberia, we compared the power of...

The toads Rhinella marina and R. schneideri are large terrestrial true toads widely distributed in the Neotropical region, which can hybridize in areas of transition between Amazon rain forest and Cerrado biomes. The former is in particular an important ecological species, and a very successful invader. Here, we report de novo transcriptome of R. marina and R. schneideri and polymorphism SNPs identified between the two species. The transcriptome sequencing was performed on an Illumina platform...

Male dimorphism has been reported across different taxa, and is usually expressed as the coexistence of a larger morph with exaggerated male traits and a smaller one with reduced traits. The evolution and maintenance of male dimorphism are still poorly understood for several of the species in which it has been observed. Here, we analyse male dimorphism in several species of reptile parasitic nematodes of the genus Spauligodon, in which a major male morph (exaggerated...

North African ungulates include several threatened and emblematic species, yet are poorly studied mainly due to their remoteness and elusiveness. Noninvasive sampling provides a useful approach to obtain ecological and genetic information essential to guide conservation actions. The very first and most important step in conservation planning is to accurately identify species, and molecular genetics has been proved to be a useful tool. Several molecular genetics protocols are available for species identification, even for samples...

Understanding how phenotypic diversity evolves is a major interest of evolutionary biology. Habitat use is an important factor in the evolution of phenotypic diversity of many animal species. Interestingly, male and female phenotypes have been frequently shown to respond differently to environmental variation. At the macroevolutionary level, this difference between the sexes is frequently analyzed by using phylogenetic comparative tools to assess variation in sexual dimorphism (SD) across taxa in relation to habitat. A shortcoming...

The bushmeat trade in tropical Africa represents illegal, unsustainable off-takes of millions of tons of wild game – mostly mammals – per year. We sequenced four mitochondrial gene fragments (cyt b, COI, 12S, 16S) in >300 bushmeat items representing nine mammalian orders and 59 morphological species from five western and central African countries (Guinea, Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea). Our objectives were to assess the efficiency of cross-species PCR amplification and to evaluate the...

Culex pipiens complex mosquitoes are important vectors for many human pathogens including West Nile encephalitis, Rift Valley fever and Lymphatic filariasis. In this study we characterized a set of SNP markers between two biotypes of the Culex pipiens complex, Culex pipiens form molestus and Culex pipiens form pipiens, for use in a high-resolution genetic mapping and population genetics. DNA pooled from 10 specimens of each biotype were sequenced and analyzed for variation in 28 genes....

The formation of stable genetic boundaries between emerging species is often diagnosed by reduced hybrid fitness relative to parental taxa. This reduced fitness can arise from endogenous and/or exogenous barriers to gene flow. Although detecting exogenous barriers in nature is difficult, we can estimate the role of ecological divergence in driving species boundaries by integrating molecular and ecological niche modelling tools. Here, we focus on a three-way secondary contact zone between three viper species (Vipera...

The study of ecological niche evolution is fundamental for understanding how the environment influences species’ geographical distributions and their adaptation to divergent environments. Here we present a study of the ecological niche, demographic history and thermal performance (locomotor activity, developmental time and fertility/viability) of the temperate species Drosophila americana and its two chromosomal forms. Temperature is the environmental factor that contributes most to the species’ and chromosomal forms’ ecological niches, although precipitation is also important...