Genetic Variation in Holocene Bowhead Whales from Svalbard.
From: Natural History Museum, University of Oslo, PO Box 1172 Blindern, N-0318 Oslo, Norway.
Molecular ecology
- Publish Date: Jun 2007
- ISSN: 0962-1083
- Volume: 16
- Issue: 11
- Pages: 2223-35
- Medium: Print
- Language: English
- Citation (JAMA): Borge T, Bachmann L, Bjørnstad G, et al. Genetic Variation in Holocene Bowhead Whales from Svalbard.. Mol. Ecol. Jun 2007;16:2223-35
Abstract
Bowhead whales (Balaena mysticetus) are distributed in the Arctic in five putative stocks. All stocks have been heavily depleted due to centuries of exploitation. In the present study, nucleotide sequence variation of the mitochondrial control region was determined from bone remains of 99 bowhead whales. The bones, 14C dated from recent to more than 50,000 bp, were collected on Svalbard (Spitsbergen) and are expected to relate to ancestors of the today nearly extinct Spitsbergen stock. Fifty-eight haplotypes were found, a few being frequent but many only found in one individual. The most abundant haplotypes of the Spitsbergen stock are the same as those most abundant in the extant Bering-Chukchi-Beaufort (BCB) Seas stock of bowhead whales. Although F(ST) indicates a slight but statistically significant genetic differentiation between the Spitsbergen and the BCB stocks this was not considered informative due to the very high levels of genetic diversity of mitochondrial DNA haplotypes in both bowhead whale stocks. Other measures such as K(ST) also indicated very low genetic differentiation between the two populations. Nucleotide diversity and haplotype diversity showed only minor differences between the Spitsbergen and BCB stocks. The data suggest that the historic Spitsbergen stock — before the severe bottleneck caused by whaling — did not have substantially more genetic variation than the extant BCB stock. The similar haplotypes of the Holocene Svalbard samples and the current BCB stock indicate significant migration between these two stocks and question the current designation of five distinct stocks of bowhead whales in the Arctic.
Mesh Headings (Keywords): Animals, Bowhead Whale, DNA, Mitochondrial, Evolution, Molecular, Haplotypes, Molecular Sequence Data, Sequence Analysis, DNA, Svalbard, Variation (Genetics)
Check for Full Text / PubMed Unique Identifier (PMID): 17561886
This abstract is part of PubMed, a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine. PubMed includes more than 17 million citations from MEDLINE and other life science journals for biomedical articles. See Copyright and Disclaimers.
Linked medical terms appearing on this page are added by Healia to help readers find more information and are not part of the original PubMed document.
The data herein was last updated on July 8th, 2008 and may not reflect the most current and accurate data available from NLM.