Unmasking the complexity of species identification in Australasian flying-foxes

Reversing the decline of threatened koala (Phascolarctos cinereus) populations in New South Wales: Using genomics to enhance conservation outcomes

Genetic management is a critical component of threatened species conservation. Understanding spatial patterns of genetic diversity is essential for evaluating the resilience of fragmented populations to accelerating anthropogenic threats. Nowhere is this more relevant than on the Australian continent, which is experiencing an ongoing loss of biodiversity that exceeds any other developed nation. Using a proprietary genome complexity reduction-based method (DArTSeq), we generated a data set of 3239 high quality Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) to investigate spatial patterns and indices of genetic diversity in the koala (Phascolarctos cinereus), a highly specialised folivorous marsupial that is experiencing rapid and widespread population declines across much of its former range. Our findings demonstrate that current management divisions across the state of New South Wales (NSW) do not fully represent the distribution of genetic diversity among extant koala populations, and that care must be taken to ensure that translocation paradigms based on these frameworks do not inadvertently restrict gene flow between populations and regions that were historically interconnected. We also recommend that koala populations should be prioritised for conservation action based on the scale and severity of the threatening processes that they are currently faced with, rather than placing too much emphasis on their perceived value (e.g., as reservoirs of potentially adaptive alleles), as our data indicate that existing genetic variation in koalas is primarily partitioned among individual animals. As such, the extirpation of koalas from any part of their range represents a potentially critical reduction of genetic diversity for this iconic Australian species.

Species assignment in forensics and the challenge of hybrids

Forensic identification of species is in growing demand, particularly from law enforcement authorities in the areas of wildlife, fisheries and hunting as well as food authentication. Within the non-human forensic genetics expanding applications' field, the major current difficulties result from the lack of standards and genetic databases as well as the poor or absent taxonomic definition of several groups. Here we focus on a forensically important and overlooked problem in species identification: the exclusive use of uniparental markers, a common practice in current genetic barcoding methodologies, may lead to incorrect or impossible assignment whenever hybrids can occur (frequently, not only in domesticates, but also in the wild). For example, if one of these cases involves a mammal, and mitochondrial DNA alone is used (which in instances may be the only type of DNA sequence available in databases), the sample will be wrongfully assigned to the female parental species, completely missing the detection of a possible hybrid animal. The importance of this issue in the forensic contributions to food authentication, wildlife and conservation genetics is analyzed. We present a cautionary guidance on the forensic reporting of results avoiding this error.

Mitochondrial DNA identified bat species in northeast India: electrocution mortality and biodiversity loss

Northeast India with two biodiversity hotspots is recognized as a biodiversity-rich region. However, several extant animals including chiropterans are currently at jeopardy due to habitat loss, electrocution mortality, and other anthropogenic threats. This study examines the efficacy of mitochondrial Cytochrome b (mtCytb) sequences for species-level identification of five electrocuted bat specimens from Manipur state. The similarity search results in the global database, Kimura 2 parameter (K2P) genetic distances, and neighbor-joining (NJ) tree identified all bat specimens into two species, Cynopterus sphinx and Megaerops niphanae. The detection of M. niphanae is the first record of this mammal from the state. In comparison with other Pteropodidae species, the genetic distances clearly discriminate both C. sphinx (7.9–30.2%) and M. niphanae (12.2–25.7%). In addition, the combined tree analysis of present and earlier genetic information of C. sphinx suggested the presence of cryptic lineages and sympatric population in India. This similar approach with more sampling from a wide distribution area could assist the future genetics research on chiropterans and their precise conservation.