EB Ford revisited: assessing the long-term stability of wing-spot patterns and population genetic structure of the meadow brown butterfly on the Isles of Scilly.
Files
(Published version)
Date
2017
Authors
Baxter, S.
Hoffman, J.
Tregenza, T.
Wedell, N.
Hosken, D.
Editors
Advisors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Type:
Journal article
Citation
Heredity, 2017; 118(4):322-329
Statement of Responsibility
SW Baxter, JI Hoffman, T Tregenza, N Wedell and DJ Hosken
Conference Name
Abstract
Understanding selection in the wild remains a major aim of evolutionary ecology and work by Ford and colleagues on the meadow brown butterfly Maniola jurtina did much to ignite this agenda. A great deal of their work was conducted during the 1950s on the Isles of Scilly. They documented island-specific wing-spot patterns that remained consistent over about a decade, but patterns on some islands changed after environmental perturbation. It was suggested that these wing-spot patterns reflected island-specific selection and that there was little migration between islands. However, genetic studies to test the underlying assumption of restricted migration are lacking and it is also unknown whether the originally described wing-spot patterns have persisted over time. We therefore collected female butterflies from five of Ford’s original study locations, including three large islands (St Mary’s, St Martin’s and Tresco) and two small islands (Tean and St Helen’s). Wing-spot patterns had not changed appreciably over time on three of the islands (two large and one small), but were significantly different on the other two. Furthermore, analysis of 176 amplified fragment length polymorphisms revealed significant genome-wide differentiation among the five islands. Our findings are consistent with Ford’s conclusions that despite the close proximity of these islands, there is restricted gene flow among them.
School/Discipline
Dissertation Note
Provenance
Description
Access Status
Rights
© The Author(s) 2017. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission fromthe license holder to reproduce thematerial. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/bync- sa/4.0/