Demographic reconstruction of Antarctic fur seals supports the krill surplus hypothesis
Much debate surrounds the importance of top-down and bottom-up effects in the Southern Ocean, where the harvesting of over two million whales in the mid twentieth century is thought to have produced a massive surplus of Antarctic krill. This excess of krill may have allowed populations of other pred...
Published in: | Genes |
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Main Authors: | , , , , , |
Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
Language: | English |
Published: |
MDPI
2022
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Subjects: | |
Online Access: | http://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/532327/ https://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/532327/1/genes-13-00541.pdf https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4425/13/3/541 |
Summary: | Much debate surrounds the importance of top-down and bottom-up effects in the Southern Ocean, where the harvesting of over two million whales in the mid twentieth century is thought to have produced a massive surplus of Antarctic krill. This excess of krill may have allowed populations of other predators, such as seals and penguins, to increase, a top-down hypothesis known as the ‘krill surplus hypothesis’. However, a lack of pre-whaling population baselines has made it challenging to investigate historical changes in the abundance of the major krill predators in relation to whaling. Therefore, we used reduced representation sequencing and a coalescent-based maximum composite likelihood approach to reconstruct the recent demographic history of the Antarctic fur seal, a pinniped that was hunted to the brink of extinction by 18th and 19th century sealers. In line with the known history of this species, we found support for a demographic model that included a substantial reduction in population size around the time period of sealing. Furthermore, maximum likelihood estimates from this model suggest that the recovered, post-sealing population at South Georgia may have been around two times larger than the pre-sealing population. Our findings lend support to the krill surplus hypothesis and illustrate the potential of genomic approaches to shed light on long-standing questions in population biology. |
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