Eurasian Otters, Lutra lutra, Have a Dominant mtDNA Haplotype From the Iberian Peninsula to Scandinavia

Abstract

The Eurasian otter, Lutra lutra, has a Palaearctic distribution and has suffered a severe decline throughout Europe during the last century. Previous studies in this and other mustelids have shown reduced levels of variability in mitochondrial DNA, although otter phylogeographic studies were restricted to central-western Europe. In this work we have sequenced 361 bp of the mtDNA control region in 73 individuals from eight countries and added our results to eight sequences available from GenBank and the literature. The range of distribution has been expanded in relation to previous works north towards Scandinavia, east to Russia and Belarus, and south to the Iberian Peninsula. We found a single dominant haplotype in 91.78% of the samples, and six more haplotypes deviating a maximum of two mutations from the dominant haplotype restricted to a single country. Variability was extremely low in western Europe but higher in eastern countries. This, together with the lack of phylogeographical structuring, supports the postglacial recolonization of Europe from a single refugium. The Eurasian otter mtDNA control region has a 220-bp variable minisatellite in Domain III that we sequenced in 29 otters. We found a total of 19 minisatellite haplotypes, but they showed no phylogenetic information.

Mitochondrial genetic diversity and structure of the European otter (Lutra lutra) in Britain

“…Two hundred and ninety-nine base pairs of sequence from the 5 0 end of the mtDNA CR from the 58 samples in this study was aligned with equivalent European otter sequences derived by Mucci et al (1999), Cassens et al (2000), Ferrando et al (2004) and Perez-Haro et al (2005) using DAMBE v4.2.13 (Xia and Xie 2001). All samples (n = 357) were then analyzed to give a description of the distributions of known European otter CR haplotypes across Europe.…”

“…Within Europe, Mucci et al (1999) identified two haplotypes, Perez-Haro et al (2005) identified three and Cassens et al (2000) and Ferrando et al (2004) identified five each. Haplotypes in these studies are often the same and the haplotype variously designated DK/Lut1/H1 has repeatedly been found to be the most common, although a second-UK/Lut3/H4 was identified as the most common in East Germany (Cassens et al 2000).…”

“…We combined sequences from the UK identified in this study with sequences already obtained from the rest of Europe (Mucci et al 1999;Cassens et al 2000;Ferrando et al 2004;Perez-Haro et al 2005) and describe the implications of these results for the future conservation of this species.…”

Phylogeography of the weasel (Mustela nivalis) in the western-Palaearctic region: combined effects of glacial events and human movements

“…However, phylogeographic studies conducted on Mustelidae are few and mostly inconclusive. The study of Davison et al (2001) on Martes martes and Mustela putorius and the work of Ferrando et al (2004) on Lutra lutra showed a lack of structuring and ancient lineages explained by an expansion from a single, but not localized, European refugium. For M. erminea, low genetic differentiation and structure were observed among continental Eurasian populations, with only one lineage from Europe (Ireland excepted) to Japan up to Alaska whose origin is not specified (Fleming and Cook, 2002;Kurose et al, 2000Kurose et al, , 2005Martinkova et al, 2007).…”

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“…great bustard (Otis tarda; Pitra et al 2000)). In contrast, little population structure has been detected in some widespread species, such as otters (Lutra lutra; Ferrando et al 2004) and several avifauna species (e.g. great spotted woodpecker (Dendrocopos major; Zink et al 2002), common sandpiper (Actitis hypoleucos; Zink et al 2008), and Eurasian magpie (Pica pica; Zhang et al 2012)).…”