Molecular evidence for historic long-distance translocations of brown bears in the Balkan region

We tested the hypothesis that brown bears were translocated from the Romanian Carpathians to Bulgaria via air transportation during the communist regime in the 1970s and 1980s. Microsatellite analysis was performed on 199 bear samples from Bulgaria and Romania. Assignment and admixture tests reveale...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Conservation genetics 2014-06, Vol.15 (3), p.743-747
Main Authors: Nowak, Carsten, Domokos, Csaba, Dutsov, Aleksandar, Frosch, Christiane
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Air transportation
Aircraft
Animal Genetics and Genomics
Animal populations
Bears
Biodiversity
Biomedical and Life Sciences
Conservation Biology/Ecology
Ecology
Evolutionary Biology
Genetic diversity
genotype
Genotype & phenotype
Genotypes
Life Sciences
microsatellite repeats
Plant Genetics and Genomics
Sex ratio
Short Communication
Spatial distribution
Translocation
Ursus arctos
Wildlife conservation
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Summary:We tested the hypothesis that brown bears were translocated from the Romanian Carpathians to Bulgaria via air transportation during the communist regime in the 1970s and 1980s. Microsatellite analysis was performed on 199 bear samples from Bulgaria and Romania. Assignment and admixture tests revealed the existence of seven genotypes (=2.8 %) in Bulgaria that were assigned with high probabilities to the Romanian population, supporting the translocation and successful establishment of Carpathian bears in Bulgaria. While we cannot rule out the possibility that active long-distance dispersal contributed to the observed pattern, the spatial distribution and sex ratio of the detected Romanian genotypes strongly favor the translocation hypothesis.
ISSN:1566-0621
1572-9737
DOI:10.1007/s10592-014-0570-7