Data from: Molecular population genetics of the northern elephant seal Mirounga angustirostris ...

• Main Authors: Abadía-Cardoso, Alicia, Freimer, Nelson, Deiner, Kristy, Garza, John
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: Dryad 2017
• Subjects: Mirounga angustirostris; Mirounga; mutation rate; Holocene; Elephant Seal
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.7k749; https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.7k749

The northern elephant seal, Mirounga angustirostris, was heavily hunted and declared extinct in the 19th century. However, a colony remained on remote Guadalupe Island, Mexico and the species has since repopulated most of its historical distribution. Here, we present a comprehensive evaluation of genetic variation in the species. First, we assess the effect of the demographic bottleneck on microsatellite variability and compare it with that found in other pinnipeds, demonstrating levels of variation similar to that in species that continue to be threatened with extinction. Next, we use sequence data from these markers to demonstrate that some of the limited polymorphism predates the bottleneck. However, most contemporary variation appears to have arisen recently and persisted due to exponential growth. We also describe how we use the range in allele size of microsatellites to estimate ancestral effective population size before the bottleneck, demonstrating a large reduction in effective size. We then employ ... : Microsatellite genotypesGenotypes of 22 microsatellites from 837 northern elephant seals.GenotypeDataforAbadia-CardosoEtAl.xls ...