Blåhed, Ida-Maria
- Department of Wildlife, Fish and Environmental Studies, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Research article2019Peer reviewedOpen access
Blahed, Ida-Maria; Ericsson, Goran; Spong, Goran
Noninvasive genetic studies of wild animals enable the recovery of information infeasible to obtain using other means. However, the low quantity and quality of noninvasively collected DNA often challenge the retrieval of reliable genotypes, which may cause biases in downstream analyses. In this study, we optimized SNP (single nucleotide polymorphism) genotyping of fecal samples from moose (Alces alces) with the main purpose of exploring the potential of using noninvasively retrieved genotypes for individual- and sex identification. Fecal pellets were collected during the late winter of 2016 on the Swedish island of oland in the Baltic Sea and DNA was extracted and genotyped using 86 autosomal, six sex-specific and five species diagnostic SNPs. The SNP error rate of the quality filtered dataset was 0.06 and the probability of identity for siblings below 0.001. Following a thorough quality filtering process, 182 reliable genotypes were obtained, corresponding to 100 unique individuals (37 males, 63 females), with an estimated male proportion of 37% (+/- 9%). The population size, estimated using two different capture-mark-recapture approaches, was found to be in the range of 115-156 individuals (95% CI). Furthermore, moose on oland showed significantly lower heterozygosity levels (z(Hexp) = -5.51, N = 69, p(Hexp) = 3.56 center dot 10(-8), z(Hobs) = -3.58, N = 69, p(Hobs) = 3.38 center dot 10(-4)) and appeared genetically differentiated from moose on the Swedish mainland. Thus, we show that quality controlled noninvasively derived SNP genotypes can be highly informative for individual and population monitoring in a large ungulate.
Alces alces; Noninvasive sampling; SNP genotyping; Wildlife monitoring; Population genetics; Capture-mark-recapture
European Journal of Wildlife Research
2019, Volume: 65, number: 6, article number: 96Publisher: SPRINGER
Zoology
Genetics
Ecology
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10344-019-1337-8
https://res.slu.se/id/publ/103481