Nrc 261 1st Edition Lecture 9 Outline of Last Lecture II Why Count Wildlife a Easy to Count III Possible Biases IV Population Estimation a 2 main questions V Eastern Timber Wolf Recovery Plan VI Mark Recapture Estimate a Assumptions of mark recapture estimates VII Indices of Abundance VIII Original Question Outline of Current Lecture II Types of Biodiversity III Why Conservation Genetics IV Techniques V How Genetics Used in Conservation a Among Species AS b Within a Species WS c Among Individuals AI VI Potential Problems VII Solutions These notes represent a detailed interpretation of the professor s lecture GradeBuddy is best used as a supplement to your own notes not as a substitute Current Lecture Conservation Genetics Specific If we caught an eastern cougar panther puma in Massachusetts how could we tell something about its origin General What can genetics tell us concerning small populations of endangered species Types of Biodiversity 1 ecosystem diversity biodiversity on a bigger scale 2 community diversity the ways in which there are interactions amongst different species comparing food webs around the world 3 Species diversity how many different species are there more species more diversity 4 Genetic diversity variation that occurs among individuals in a species Why conservation genetics Provides an understanding of evolutionary processes how things came about must infer things about how something got here adaptations to the environment etc Identifies levels of genetic diversity within species in particular What can we find out how many species are there morphology can only take you so far things that look the same that aren t things that look very different that are actually closely related How unusual are the taxa things that are weird and there isn t much else like it on earth not going to be easy to replace large consequences if they are gotten rid of how many individuals are there uniquely identifiable when is a species is in trouble population demography things that go along with having small populations and consequences of inbreeding Techniques sample collection organs blood hair scats sample analyses enzymes mitochondrial DNA Nuclear DNA and RNA Polymerase Chain Reaction PCR early on analyzed the liver to try to tell variation by analyzing enzymes 1970s in the 1980 s collecting blood samples to look at differentiating fox species late 1990 s able to use nuclear DNA and RNA because of the PCR duplicating machine difficult to get enough DNA to do something with it s better to make lots of copies of the DNA with PCR take DNA split it apart then add a bunch of similar nucleotides molecules that make up DNA and if you do it correctly then the nucleotides connect to separate strands of DNA and make duplicates exponential growth Examples of how genetics are used in conservation Among species how do we use genetics to ask and answer questions having to do with a bunch of different species within a species differentiation usually having to do with geography how some populations of a species are compared to another population of same species among individuals who s who and why that is important or how animals are related to one another AS How are these species related Raccoon black bear giant panda red panda bears are big flat footed and morphologically varying to some extent giant pandas have restricted range only occur in range in china called bears because they look bear like and are that same size another critter from mountainous areas in china and Bhutan called the red panda much smaller but a roundish creature that lives in trees has a mask and ringed tail like raccoons raccoons and bears somewhat related Panda Phylogeny basic genetic research on those species looked at sequences of DNA RNA genetic material and how similar or different they are more different they are the more distantly related to each other they are get an image that looks like a family tree lesser pandas are over with raccoons because they had a common ancestor 30 million years ago so they re really different but more similar to each other than other carnivores brown black sun sloth bear are much more closely related giant panda are bears with a common ancestor 20 million years ago really different kind of bear looked at molecules and genetics to figure this out it made a lot of sense but gave an idea of how close or how different they are AS What Species is it Bobcat vs lynx they look morphologically similar but lynx live north and bobcat live south lynx are good in snow because of giant feet but bobcats have relatively small feet if you analyze scats and get DNA off scats it helps to tell them apart WS Geographical History Bananaquit tropical little bird look at distribution some in Mexico and all through south america some in the Amazon lots of islands in the caribbean how related are these to one another are island species different from other species on island isolated all birds on one island could be considered its own population Bananaquit phylogenies lines more closely connected are more closely related to one another shows that even a long time ago the birds that were on Jamaica got isolated from all the other birds and they evolved to become something different all birds from puerto rico are all interrelated etc all caribbean birds are different from ones in mainland of south american and central america over time they have been isolated in different ways and there has been less genetic exchange and they could be considered different populations if you wanted to manage them would have to do so in an area by area basis WS Population Bottleneck when population gets down to very low numbers and there isn t much genetic diversity tracing that genetic history can tell you what might have happened in the past and how that might effect the particular species you re looking at Island Gray Fox Channel Islands off the coast of California have island foxes on them Island Fox Gel the foxes were all identical for the little bit of DNA that they could look at all from the same island all the foxes on the other islands was different from each other differentiation between the islands but on an islands the DNA all looked the same all inbred Island Colonization closest ancestor gray fox common on the mainland 16 500 years ago all of the island foxes had common ancestor on mainland so how did they get to the island humans took them to the islands shows the pattern in which the foxes got to all the