| Summary: | The Greenlandic and west-central Siberianbreeding populations of Sanderlings Calidris alba areseparated by ca. 2000 km during the breeding season, butmix in Europe to some extent during migration. However,the number of Siberian Sanderlings that spend the nonbreedingseason along the East Atlantic Flyway (extendingfrom western Europe to South Africa), if any, is unknown.Although both populations are considered part of thenominate subspecies C. a. alba based on morphology,population structure in Sanderlings has yet to be describedwith molecular methods. We examined genetic differentiationat the mtDNA control region (CR) and sevenmicrosatellite loci between Greenland- and Siberia-breedingSanderlings in order to: (1) develop a diagnostic toolfor assessing the breeding origin of Sanderlings along theEast Atlantic Flyway, and (2) provide a comparison withthe co-distributed and ecologically similar Red Knot, inwhich CR differentiation of geographically analogouspopulations (C. canutus islandica and C. c. canutus) hasindicated isolation of lineages near the time of the lastglacial maximum. By contrast, we found only weak differentiationbetween the Sanderling breeding populationsat the CR, and no differentiation at microsatellite loci.These results suggest that the assignment of breeding originof Sanderlings on Afro-European flyways will not bepossible with simple and inexpensive genetic methods, andimply that Sanderlings and Red Knots have very differentpost-glacial phylogeographic histories.
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