Abstract
We sampled 45 Andean mountain tapirs (Tapirus pinchaque)
from Colombia and Ecuador and sequenced 15 mitochondrial genes (two
rRNA and 13 protein codifying genes)—making up 13,939 base pairs,
approximately 83.1% of the total mitochondrial DNA's length. The overall
sample had low to medium levels of nucleotide diversity with diversity
slightly higher for the Colombian population. Both populations
experienced high historical gene flow and our genetic heterogeneity
analyses revealed a low genetic differentiation between them. Therefore,
we did not detect any molecular subspecies, or significantly different
evolutionary units for T. pinchaque. This species experienced a
population expansion in the last 100,000 years but this expansion was
more pronounced in the Ecuadorian population especially in the last
10,000 years, whereas the Colombian population underwent a strong
bottleneck in the last 5,000 years. There was no significant spatial
trend in genetic structure for the mountain tapir in Colombia and
Ecuador. Phylogenetic analyses did not detect any important geographic
clade within this species. Temporal split between T. pinchaque and T. terrestris might have occurred around 7–1.5 million years ago (MYA). T. pinchaque and T. terrestris + T. kabomani are two monophyletic clades, suggesting that T. kabomani is not a full species.
Keywords
- Tapirus pinchaque;
- Mitochondrial DNA;
- Genetic diversity;
- Spatial genetic structure;
- Phylogenetic analyses
Copyright © 2015 Deutsche Gesellschaft für Säugetierkunde. Published by Elsevier GmbH All rights reserved.
