How to translate text using browser tools
1 June 2013 Population Decline in a Long-Lived Species: The Wood Turtle in Michigan
Janna R. Willoughby, Mekala Sundaram, Timothy L. Lewis, Bradley J. Swanson
Author Affiliations +
Abstract

Populations of Wood Turtles, Glyptemys insculpta, have steadily decreased over the past 30 yr because of habitat destruction and degradation. We sampled Wood Turtles from three areas in Michigan, USA, to characterize populations, quantify demographic trends, and measure the effect of declining population size on genetic diversity. Wood Turtle samples (n = 68) were collected from three rivers in the Lower Peninsula of Michigan and analyzed at nine microsatellite loci. Bayesian clustering programs identified two populations that split the three sampling sites into North and South populations. In both populations, analysis of genealogies estimated r < 0, indicating population decline. However, no evidence of a bottleneck was detected (P = 0.30 North, P = 0.29 South), and little evidence of inbreeding was observed (average North FIS = 0.25, average South FIS = 0.23), relative to other Emydidae populations. The high genetic diversity observed in the North and South populations is likely due to immigration between the two populations (FST = 0.04), coupled with the long life span of the Wood Turtle. The conflicting signals suggested from the genealogy models compared to the FIS and bottleneck analysis suggests that coalescent models may be better suited to detect population decline than other measures of genetic diversity in long-lived species such as the Wood Turtle.

Janna R. Willoughby, Mekala Sundaram, Timothy L. Lewis, and Bradley J. Swanson "Population Decline in a Long-Lived Species: The Wood Turtle in Michigan," Herpetologica 69(2), 186-198, (1 June 2013). https://doi.org/10.1655/HERPETOLOGICA-D-12-00033R2
Accepted: 1 January 2013; Published: 1 June 2013
KEYWORDS
coalescence
conservation
Emydidae
microsatellite
ONeSAMP
RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS
Get copyright permission
Back to Top