Skip to main content

Research Repository

Advanced Search

Genomics of post-bottleneck recovery in the northern elephant seal.

Hoelzel, A Rus; Gkafas, Georgios A; Kang, Hui; Sarigol, Fatih; Le Boeuf, Burney; Costa, Daniel P; Beltran, Roxanne S; Reiter, Joanne; Robinson, Patrick W; McInerney, Nancy; Seim, Inge; Sun, Shuai; Fan, Guangyi; Li, Songhai

Genomics of post-bottleneck recovery in the northern elephant seal. Thumbnail


Authors

Hui Kang

Fatih Sarigol

Burney Le Boeuf

Daniel P Costa

Roxanne S Beltran

Joanne Reiter

Patrick W Robinson

Nancy McInerney

Inge Seim

Shuai Sun

Guangyi Fan

Songhai Li



Abstract

Populations and species are threatened by human pressure, but their fate is variable. Some depleted populations, such as that of the northern elephant seal (Mirounga angustirostris), recover rapidly even when the surviving population was small. The northern elephant seal was hunted extensively and taken by collectors between the early 1800s and 1892, suffering an extreme population bottleneck as a consequence. Recovery was rapid and now there are over 200,000 individuals. We sequenced 260 modern and 8 historical northern elephant seal nuclear genomes to assess the impact of the population bottleneck on individual northern elephant seals and to better understand their recovery. Here we show that inbreeding, an increase in the frequency of alleles compromised by lost function, and allele frequency distortion, reduced the fitness of breeding males and females, as well as the performance of adult females on foraging migrations. We provide a detailed investigation of the impact of a severe bottleneck on fitness at the genomic level and report on the role of specific gene systems. [Abstract copyright: © 2024. The Author(s).]

Citation

Hoelzel, A. R., Gkafas, G. A., Kang, H., Sarigol, F., Le Boeuf, B., Costa, D. P., …Li, S. (2024). Genomics of post-bottleneck recovery in the northern elephant seal. Nature Ecology and Evolution, 8, 686-694. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-024-02337-4

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Jan 19, 2024
Online Publication Date Feb 21, 2024
Publication Date 2024-04
Deposit Date Mar 21, 2024
Publicly Available Date Mar 21, 2024
Journal Nature ecology & evolution
Publisher Nature Research
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 8
Pages 686-694
DOI https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-024-02337-4
Public URL https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/2313817

Files


Published Journal Article (Advanced Online Version) (4 Mb)
PDF

Licence
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
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 license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license 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 license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.





You might also like



Downloadable Citations