Mitochondrial CR-1 Variation in Sardinian Hares and Its Relationships with Other Old World Hares (Genus Lepus)

Abstract

Among the European fauna, the Sardinian hare (Lepus sp.) is peculiar in that it differs from all other hares inhabiting the continent. Here, we report on the variation of a 461 bp sequence of hypervariable domain 1 of the mitochondrial control region, examined in 42 hares collected throughout Sardinia and compared to the corresponding sequences of different Lepus taxa. Seventeen novel haplotypes were found in the Sardinian population, resulting in a haplotype diversity of 0.840 and a nucleotide diversity of 0.012. As a result of Bayesian and principal coordinates analyses, Sardinian hares were grouped with North African hares, constituting a monophyletic clade that diverges from all other Old World hares, including Cape hares from South Africa and East Asia. Hence, our data agree that populations inhabiting North Africa and Sardinia form a distinct taxon, which could possibly be included in the L. capensis superspecies. Moreover, two corresponding lineages can be found in Sardinia and Tunisia, providing evidence of a common origin of the two populations and thus supporting the hypothesis that North African hares were introduced into the island in historical times. Our data show that the two lineages differ in their geographic distribution throughout the island and that the wild Sardinian population also shows the signature of a postintroduction demographic expansion.

Effects of human perturbation on the genetic make-up of an island population: the case of the Sardinian wild boar

“…Unlike two other game species (Lepus capensis mediterraneus and Alectoris barbara), which were both historically introduced into the island and showed no or negligible signs of genetic introgression from continental stocks (Scandura et al, 2007(Scandura et al, , 2010, the Sardinian wild boar population shows the effects of a stronger extent of illegal introductions, mainly concerning the eastern part of the island. The strong recreational interest for this species, a negative demographic trend in Sardinia's past, the international trade opportunities and the ease with which wild boars can be raised in captivity may account for the present genetic composition of the population.…”

Molecular Approaches Revealing Prehistoric, Historic, or Recent Translocations and Introductions of Hares (Genus Lepus) by Humans

“…A recent analysis [52] of sequences of mtHV-1 of 33 hares collected in diverse parts of Sardinia revealed very close phylogenetic relationships of all haplotypes to all lineages so far found in hares from north-central Tunisia [11]. One haplotype from hares collected close to the Mediterranean coast in Northwest Egypt was somewhat more distantly related to all Sardinian sequences.…”

“…), when lowered sea levels resulted in natural landbridges in other parts of Europe. Earlier in the Pleistocene, two relatively short periods of landbridge connections with mainland Italy could have theoretically enabled hares to immigrate into Sardinia [52], but no fossil traces have been discovered to corroborate such a possible natural invasion. The only subfossil or fossil Pleistocene lagomorph species found in Sardinia is the Sardinian Pika (Prolagus sardus Wagner, 1829), extinct since the 18th century (see [16,17,65]; also cf.…”

Molecular evidence of conspecificity of South African hares conventionally considered Lepus capensis L., 1758

“…In an initial phylogenetic analysis we included all reliable sequences available from GenBank that could be aligned to our sequences with a reasonable number of base pairs (for a list of GenBank accession numbers see Ben Scandura et al 2007; L. yakardensis: AY859501 to AY859525; AY821659 to AY821663; AY823309; AY820781 to AY820802). Prior to a Neighbor Joining (NJ) analysis we used Modeltest 3.06 to find the best-fit model of DNA substitution (Posada and Crandall 1998), which was the HKY85 model with T-Ratio ¼ 7.4852, Shape ¼ 0.8187, Pinvar ¼ 0.3221.…”