African elephant conservation and population genetics
type: CreativeWork
description: Despite advances in technology and management practices, countless species of wildlife continue to decline and become threatened with extinction, largely due to human activities such as poaching and habitat destruction. The field of conservation genetics aims to reduce the rate and severity of species decline by better understanding their genetics and making relevant information available to conservation and management entities. African elephants are in decline and the research here aims to answer important questions relevant to conservation efforts. (1) Phylogeographic patterns between nuclear and mitochondrial DNA in African elephants are often incongruent, which has been attributed to sex-biased dispersal and variance in reproductive success. To examine this, we sequenced the mitochondrial genome of two African forest elephants and examined the coalescent dates within the elephantid lineage. Comparing mitochondrial and nuclear coalescence dates, we found the ratio to be much greater than 0.25, which is consistent with the expectation that sex differences in dispersal and in variance of reproductive success would have increased the effective population size of mtDNA relative to nuclear markers in elephantids, thus contributing to the persistence of incongruent mtDNA phylogeographic patterns. (2) Past research on African elephant genetics has focused heavily on the phylogenetic relationship of forest and savanna elephants. Few studies have examined savanna elephant population genetics exclusively; those that have were limited in geographic scope or relied on mitochondrial DNA which has been shown to be a poor indicator of nuclear population structure. In this study we determined the extent of range wide, intra-species genetic variation for the African savanna elephant using multilocus genotype data. Our findings indicated that African savanna elephants have not undergone a population bottleneck within the last 2 to 4 NE generations. Additionally, there was strong s…
abstract: Despite advances in technology and management practices, countless species of wildlife continue to decline and become threatened with extinction, largely due to human activities such as poaching and habitat destruction. The field of conservation genetics aims to reduce the rate and severity of species decline by better understanding their genetics and making relevant information available to conservation and management entities. African elephants are in decline and the research here aims to answer important questions relevant to conservation efforts. (1) Phylogeographic patterns between nuclear and mitochondrial DNA in African elephants are often incongruent, which has been attributed to sex-biased dispersal and variance in reproductive success. To examine this, we sequenced the mitochondrial genome of two African forest elephants and examined the coalescent dates within the elephantid lineage. Comparing mitochondrial and nuclear coalescence dates, we found the ratio to be much greater than 0.25, which is consistent with the expectation that sex differences in dispersal and in variance of reproductive success would have increased the effective population size of mtDNA relative to nuclear markers in elephantids, thus contributing to the persistence of incongruent mtDNA phylogeographic patterns. (2) Past research on African elephant genetics has focused heavily on the phylogenetic relationship of forest and savanna elephants. Few studies have examined savanna elephant population genetics exclusively; those that have were limited in geographic scope or relied on mitochondrial DNA which has been shown to be a poor indicator of nuclear population structure. In this study we determined the extent of range wide, intra-species genetic variation for the African savanna elephant using multilocus genotype data. Our findings indicated that African savanna elephants have not undergone a population bottleneck within the last 2 to 4 NE generations. Additionally, there was strong s…
author: Brandt, Adam
language: en
keywords: Proboscidea, savanna elephant, forest elephant, fecal DNA, Loxodonta, microsatellites, mitochondrial DNA, single nucleotide polymorphism
date published: 2015-01-21T19:55:27Z
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:26:07Z
provider: University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/2142/72995