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Cladogenesis of the European brown hare (Lepus europaeus Pallas, 1778)

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Abstract

A substantial portion of today’s biodiversity is attributed to the climatic oscillations of the Pleistocene Ice Ages. Gradual but dramatic climate changes were accompanied by expansion, contraction, and isolation of populations, promoting the accumulation of genome differences and adaptations in refugial populations and resulting in allopatric differentiation in a variety of taxa. In the present study, partial mitochondrial DNA sequences of the widely distributed European brown hare (Lepus europaeus) were analyzed to test whether the species’ present genetic structure is the result of postglacial re-colonization of Europe from Asia Minor (clade A) and the Balkans (clade B) only, as suggested previously, or if additional refugia are likely. Analyses indicated the presence of an additional refugium (Italy, clade I). The genealogic network of Italian hares displayed the tree-like structure expected from refugial populations, whereas central European brown hare haplotypes revealed a clear star-phylogeny indicative of past-bottleneck population growth. This population size expansion, which was confirmed by mismatch analysis, was estimated to have occurred ∼50–55 thousand years ago (kya). The divergence of clade A* from the remaining matrilines is estimated at 239 kya, whereas the divergence of the ancestors of clades B* and I from A* occurred about 128 kya.

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Abbreviations

HT:

haplotype

CE:

central Europe

I:

Italy

ky:

thousand years

kya:

thousand years ago

A*:

clade A with additional sequences

B*:

clade B with additional sequences

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Acknowledgments

We are very grateful to all people (especially hunters and forest wardens) who contributed to this study. T. Noventa and A. Schmidt offered expert technical assistance. U. Peschel, S. Blottner, M. Faßbender (all IZW), and M. Putze (Friedrich-Schiller University Jena) provided numerous hare samples, as did D. Faber (University Gießen, Germany), Z. Pielowski (Research Institute of the Polish Hunter’s Association Czempiń, Poland), J. Slamečka (Czech Academy of Landscape Ecology, Brno), and K. Schmidt (Mammal Research Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Białowieza). Spanish hares were kindly provided by the Scientific Collection of the Doñana Biological Station (CSIC) and the CSIC-Navarra Foral Goverment project, Spain. Special thanks goes to Dr. N. Benecke (German Archeological Institute) for his help regarding the paleontology of L. europaeus. HCH and EP were funded by the Centro di Ecologia Alpina and the Research Fund of the Autonomous Province of Trento (Project Faunagen). We also thank the two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions and comments on a previous version of the manuscript. All experiments carried out in the course of this study complied with the existing law in Germany.

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Table S1

Lepus europaeus collection sites sorted by occurring haplotype (HT) (DOC 138 kb)

Table S2

109* haplotypes of 803 brown hares from Central Europe (CE, n = 770) and Italy (I, n = 33), defined on the basis of the mtDNA d-loop (335 bp) (DOC 118 kb)

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Fickel, J., Hauffe, H.C., Pecchioli, E. et al. Cladogenesis of the European brown hare (Lepus europaeus Pallas, 1778). Eur J Wildl Res 54, 495–510 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10344-008-0175-x

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