Consequences of past climate change and recent human persecution on mitogenomic diversity in the arctic fox

Abstract

Ancient DNA provides a powerful means to investigate the timing, rate and extent of population declines caused by extrinsic factors, such as past climate change and human activities. One species probably affected by both these factors is the arctic fox, which had a large distribution during the last glaciation that subsequently contracted at the start of the Holocene. More recently, the arctic fox population in Scandinavia went through a demographic bottleneck owing to human persecution. To investigate the consequences of these processes, we generated mitogenome sequences from a temporal dataset comprising Pleistocene, historical and modern arctic fox samples. We found no evidence that Pleistocene populations in mid-latitude Europe or Russia contributed to the present-day gene pool of the Scandinavian population, suggesting that postglacial climate warming led to local population extinctions. Furthermore, during the twentieth-century bottleneck in Scandinavia, at least half of the mitogenome haplotypes were lost, consistent with a 20-fold reduction in female effective population size. In conclusion, these results suggest that the arctic fox in mainland Western Europe has lost genetic diversity as a result of both past climate change and human persecution. Consequently, it might be particularly vulnerable to the future challenges posed by climate change.This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘The past is a foreign country: how much can the fossil record actually inform conservation?’

Informing conservation strategies with museum genomics: Long‐term effects of past anthropogenic persecution on the elusive European wildcat

“…Nevertheless, to increase statistical power for the monitoring of genetic erosion in subsequent studies and reduce potential effects of ascertainment bias, we recommend to aim for a higher number of SNP markers (min. several hundred; e.g., Cammen et al, 2018 ; Ewart et al, 2019 ; Stronen et al, 2019a ), consider second‐generation sequencing of microsatellites (Curto et al, 2019 ), or data from WGS (Larsson et al, 2019 ; Loog et al, 2020 ; White et al, 2018 ).…”

Long-term population decline of a genetically homogenous continental-wide top Arctic predator

“…Similarly, the climate warming that occurred after the LGM in the Northern Hemisphere reduced effective population sizes, genetic diversity, and/ or census counts of other Arctic species like the polar bear Ursus maritimus (Miller et al . 2012) and the Arctic fox Vulpes lagopus (Larsson et al . 2019).…”

“…Indeed, population reconstructions showed that temperature increases reduced the effective population size of three penguin genera (Eudyptes, Pygoscelis, and Aptenodytes) in Antarctica (Cole et al 2019), highlighting ecosystem-wide responses to climate changes in the Antarctic ocean in the past. Similarly, the climate warming that occurred after the LGM in the Northern Hemisphere reduced effective population sizes, genetic diversity, and/ or census counts of other Arctic species like the polar bear Ursus maritimus (Miller et al 2012) and the Arctic fox Vulpes lagopus (Larsson et al 2019). Global warming has also been implicated as a major factor in the mass extinction of Late Quaternary megafauna in the Northern Hemisphere (Lorenzen et al 2011, Lord et al 2020, Stewart et al 2021; but see Sandom et al 2014).…”

Ancient mitogenomes unravel massive genetic diversity loss during near extinction of Alpine ibex

“…However, humans may not always be to blame. Studies on Musk ox and Kea interestingly identified environmental changes as the most important drivers of diversity loss suggesting prolonged histories of small population size (Campos et al 2010;Dussex et al 2015), while (Larsson et al 2019) revealed a complex interplay of climatic and anthropogenic factors in arctic fox. There is also contradicting evidence and hence an ongoing debate on the role of humans in the Late Quaternary megafauna mass extinction (Koch and Barnosky 2006;Campos et al 2010;Sandom et al 2014;Lord et al 2020;Stewart et al 2021).…”