Intra- and interspecific morphological variation in sympatric and allopatric populations of Mustela putorius and M. ever
- PDF / 618,769 Bytes
- 12 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 100 Downloads / 158 Views
ORIGINAL PAPER
Intra- and interspecific morphological variation in sympatric and allopatric populations of Mustela putorius and M. eversmanii (Carnivora: Mustelidae) and detection of potential hybrids Tamás Cserkész 1 Gábor Csorba 1
&
Csaba Kiss 2 & Zoltán Barkaszi 3
&
Tamás Görföl 1,4
&
Igor Zagorodniuk 3
&
Gábor Sramkó 5
&
Received: 1 July 2020 / Accepted: 16 October 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract European mustelids include the European polecat, Mustela putorius, and the steppe polecat, M. eversmanii. Both occur sympatrically in the Pannonian Basin, where M. eversmanii hungarica represents the westernmost part of the latter species and they allegedly hybridize. We investigated the morphological relationships in sympatric and allopatric populations of these mustelids with representative sampling, taxonomic and geographic coverage. We evaluated inter- and intraspecific patterns of morphological differentiation of 20 cranial measurements and four external traits by distance-based morphometric approaches and multivariate analyses. Our results revealed a considerable heterogeneity in cranial morphology. The two species appeared to be clearly differentiated although sympatric populations were closer to each other and had a slight overlap in the morphometric space. Within M. eversmanii, the subspecies and the nominal taxon only partially overlapped, and M. eversmanii eversmanii was more distant from M. putorius than subspecies hungarica. Although morphometric analyses revealed several intermediate individuals in size in sympatric M. eversmanii and M. putorius populations, only a small fraction of such specimens showed conflict in discrete morphological characters with the diagnostic discriminant function. We interpret these results as an indication of ongoing hybridisation between sympatric populations, but the low number of hybrids identified suggests limited genetic exchange between the species. Keywords Polecats . Ferrets . Morphometry . Phenotype . Hybridisation Communicated by: Andrzej Zalewski Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s13364-020-00543-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Tamás Cserkész [email protected] 1
Department of Zoology, Hungarian Natural History Museum, H-1088, Baross u. 13, Budapest, Hungary
2
Department of Systematic Zoology and Ecology, Eötvös Loránd University, Institute of Biology, Pázmány Péter sétány 1/c., H-1117, Budapest, Hungary
3
National Museum of Natural History NAS of Ukraine, 15 Bohdan Khmelnytsky St., Kyiv 01030, Ukraine
4
National Laboratory of Virology, Szentágothai Research Centre, University of Pécs, Ifjúság útja 20, H-7624 Pécs, Hungary
5
MTA-DE ‘Lendület’ Evolutionary Phylogenomics Research Group, H-4032 Egyetem ter 1, Debrecen, Hungary
Introduction Three extant polecat species of the subgenus Putorius are recognized: the European polecat (Mustela putorius L., 1758), the steppe polecat (M. eversmanii Lesson, 1827) and the black-footed ferret (M.
Data Loading...
