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Hybridization Hotspots at Bat Swarming Sites
During late summer and early autumn in temperate zones of the Northern Hemisphere, thousands of bats gather at caves, mainly for the purpose of mating. We demonstrated that this swarming behavior most probably leads not only to breeding among bats of the same species but also interbreeding between d...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Public Library of Science
2012
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3532499/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23300912 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0053334 |
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author | Bogdanowicz, Wiesław Piksa, Krzysztof Tereba, Anna |
author_facet | Bogdanowicz, Wiesław Piksa, Krzysztof Tereba, Anna |
author_sort | Bogdanowicz, Wiesław |
collection | PubMed |
description | During late summer and early autumn in temperate zones of the Northern Hemisphere, thousands of bats gather at caves, mainly for the purpose of mating. We demonstrated that this swarming behavior most probably leads not only to breeding among bats of the same species but also interbreeding between different species. Using 14 nuclear microsatellites and three different methods (the Bayesian assignment approaches of STRUCTURE and NEWHYBRIDS and a principal coordinate analysis of pairwise genetic distances), we analyzed 375 individuals belonging to three species of whiskered bats (genus Myotis) at swarming sites across their sympatric range in southern Poland. The overall hybridization rate varied from 3.2 to 7.2%. At the species level, depending on the method used, these values ranged from 2.1–4.6% in M. mystacinus and 3.0–3.7% in M. brandtii to 6.5–30.4% in M. alcathoe. Hybrids occurred in about half of the caves we studied. In all three species, the sex ratio of hybrids was biased towards males but the observed differences did not differ statistically from those noted at the population level. In our opinion, factors leading to the formation of these admixed individuals and their relatively high frequency are: i) swarming behaviour at swarming sites, where high numbers of bats belonging to several species meet; ii) male-biased sex ratio during the swarming period; iii) the fact that all these bats are generally polygynous. The highly different population sizes of different species at swarming sites may also play some role. Swarming sites may represent unique hybrid hotspots, which, as there are at least 2,000 caves in the Polish Carpathians alone, may occur on a massive scale not previously observed for any group of mammal species in the wild. Evidently, these sites should be treated as focal points for the conservation of biodiversity and evolutionary processes. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-3532499 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2012 |
publisher | Public Library of Science |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-35324992013-01-08 Hybridization Hotspots at Bat Swarming Sites Bogdanowicz, Wiesław Piksa, Krzysztof Tereba, Anna PLoS One Research Article During late summer and early autumn in temperate zones of the Northern Hemisphere, thousands of bats gather at caves, mainly for the purpose of mating. We demonstrated that this swarming behavior most probably leads not only to breeding among bats of the same species but also interbreeding between different species. Using 14 nuclear microsatellites and three different methods (the Bayesian assignment approaches of STRUCTURE and NEWHYBRIDS and a principal coordinate analysis of pairwise genetic distances), we analyzed 375 individuals belonging to three species of whiskered bats (genus Myotis) at swarming sites across their sympatric range in southern Poland. The overall hybridization rate varied from 3.2 to 7.2%. At the species level, depending on the method used, these values ranged from 2.1–4.6% in M. mystacinus and 3.0–3.7% in M. brandtii to 6.5–30.4% in M. alcathoe. Hybrids occurred in about half of the caves we studied. In all three species, the sex ratio of hybrids was biased towards males but the observed differences did not differ statistically from those noted at the population level. In our opinion, factors leading to the formation of these admixed individuals and their relatively high frequency are: i) swarming behaviour at swarming sites, where high numbers of bats belonging to several species meet; ii) male-biased sex ratio during the swarming period; iii) the fact that all these bats are generally polygynous. The highly different population sizes of different species at swarming sites may also play some role. Swarming sites may represent unique hybrid hotspots, which, as there are at least 2,000 caves in the Polish Carpathians alone, may occur on a massive scale not previously observed for any group of mammal species in the wild. Evidently, these sites should be treated as focal points for the conservation of biodiversity and evolutionary processes. Public Library of Science 2012-12-28 /pmc/articles/PMC3532499/ /pubmed/23300912 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0053334 Text en © 2012 Bogdanowicz et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited. |
spellingShingle | Research Article Bogdanowicz, Wiesław Piksa, Krzysztof Tereba, Anna Hybridization Hotspots at Bat Swarming Sites |
title | Hybridization Hotspots at Bat Swarming Sites |
title_full | Hybridization Hotspots at Bat Swarming Sites |
title_fullStr | Hybridization Hotspots at Bat Swarming Sites |
title_full_unstemmed | Hybridization Hotspots at Bat Swarming Sites |
title_short | Hybridization Hotspots at Bat Swarming Sites |
title_sort | hybridization hotspots at bat swarming sites |
topic | Research Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3532499/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23300912 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0053334 |
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