Supplementary material from "A global cline in a colour polymorphism suggests a limited contribution of gene flow towards the recovery of a heavily exploited marine mammal" ...

• Main Authors: Hoffman, J. I., Bauer, E., Paijmans, A. J., Humble, E., Beckmann, L. M., Kubetschek, C., Christaller, F., Kröcker, N., Fuchs, B., Moreras, A., Shihlomule, Y. D., Bester, M. N., Cleary, A. C., De Bruyn, P. J. N., Forcada, J., Goebel, M. E., Goldsworthy, S. D., Guinet, C., Hoelzel, A. R., Lydersen, C., Kovacs, K. M., Lowther, A.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: The Royal Society 2024
• Subjects: Ecology not elsewhere classified; Genetics; FOS Biological sciences; Antarc*; Antarctic; Antarctic Fur Seal; Arctocephalus gazella; Marion Island
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.4248443; https://rs.figshare.com/collections/Supplementary_material_from_A_global_cline_in_a_colour_polymorphism_suggests_a_limited_contribution_of_gene_flow_towards_the_recovery_of_a_heavily_exploited_marine_mammal_/4248443

Evaluating how populations are connected by migration is important for understanding species resilience because gene flow can facilitate recovery from demographic declines. We therefore investigated the extent to which migration may have contributed to the global recovery of the Antarctic fur seal ( Arctocephalus gazella ), a circumpolar distributed marine mammal that was brought to the brink of extinction by the sealing industry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is widely believed that animals emigrating from South Georgia, where a relict population escaped sealing, contributed to the re-establishment of formerly occupied breeding colonies across the geographical range of the species. To investigate this, we interrogated a genetic polymorphism (S291F) in the melanocortin 1 receptor gene, which is responsible for a cream-coloured phenotype that is relatively abundant at South Georgia and which appears to have recently spread to localities as far afield as Marion Island in the sub-Antarctic ...