Stow A J, Sunnucks P
Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University, NSW 2109 Australia.
Mol Ecol. 2004 Feb;13(2):419-30. doi: 10.1046/j.1365-294x.2003.02061.x.
While habitat alteration has considerable potential to disrupt important within-population processes, such as mating and kin structure, via changed patterns of dispersal, this has rarely been tested. We are investigating the impact of anthropogenic habitat alteration on the population biology of the rock-dwelling Australian lizard Egernia cunninghami on the Central Tablelands of New South Wales, Australia, by comparing deforested and adjacent naturally vegetated areas. The novel analyses in this paper, and its companion, build on previous work by adding a new replicate site, more loci and more individuals. The additional microsatellite loci yield sufficient power for parentage analysis and the sociobiological inferences that flow from it. Genetic and capture-mark-recapture techniques were used to investigate mate and site fidelity and associated kin structure. Analyses of the mating system and philopatry using 10 microsatellite loci showed high levels of site fidelity by parents and their offspring in natural and deforested habitats. Parentage assignment revealed few individuals with multiple breeding partners within seasons and fidelity of pairs across two or more breeding seasons was typical. Despite reduced dispersal, increased group sizes and significant, dramatic increases in relatedness among individuals within rock outcrops in deforested areas, no significant differences between deforested and natural areas were evident in the degree of multiple mating or philopatry of breeding partners within and across seasons. With the exception that there was a significantly higher proportion of unmated males in the deforested area, the social and mating structure of this species has so far been surprisingly robust to substantial perturbation of dispersal and relatedness structure. Nonetheless, approximately 10-fold elevation of mean pairwise relatedness in the deforested areas has great potential to increase inbred matings, which is investigated in the companion paper.
虽然栖息地改变极有可能通过改变扩散模式扰乱种群内部的重要过程，如交配和亲属结构，但这一点很少得到验证。我们正在通过比较森林砍伐地区和相邻的自然植被地区，研究人为栖息地改变对澳大利亚新南威尔士州中部台地的岩栖蜥蜴坎宁安氏鬃狮蜥种群生物学的影响。本文及其姊妹篇中的新分析是在之前工作的基础上进行的，增加了一个新的重复位点、更多的基因座和更多个体。额外的微卫星基因座为亲权分析及由此得出的社会生物学推断提供了足够的效力。我们运用遗传和标记重捕技术来研究配偶忠诚度、地点忠诚度及相关的亲属结构。利用10个微卫星基因座对交配系统和留居习性进行分析，结果表明，在自然栖息地和森林砍伐地区，亲代及其后代的地点忠诚度都很高。亲权分配显示，季节内很少有个体拥有多个繁殖伴侣，并且典型情况是配偶在两个或更多繁殖季节保持忠诚。尽管扩散减少、群体规模增加，且森林砍伐地区岩缝内个体间的亲缘关系显著大幅增加，但在多个交配情况或繁殖伴侣在季节内及跨季节的留居习性方面，森林砍伐地区和自然地区之间没有明显差异。除了森林砍伐地区未交配雄性的比例显著更高外，到目前为止，该物种的社会和交配结构对扩散和亲属关系结构的大幅扰动表现出了惊人的稳健性。尽管如此，森林砍伐地区平均成对亲缘关系升高约10倍极有可能增加近亲交配，这一点在姊妹篇论文中进行了研究。
