Biology Faculty Articles

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2-1-2023

Publication Title

Heredity

ISSN

1365-2540

Volume

130

First Page

154

Last Page

162

Abstract

Chickens are believed to have inhabited the Hawaiian island of Kauai since the first human migrations around 1200AD, but numbers have peaked since the tropical storms Iniki and Iwa in the 1980s and 1990s that destroyed almost all the chicken coops on the island and released large numbers of domestic chickens into the wild. Previous studies have shown these now feral chickens are an admixed population between Red Junglefowl (RJF) and domestic chickens. Here, using genetic haplotypic data, we estimate the time of the admixture event between the feral population on the island and the RJF to 1981 (1976–1995), coinciding with the timings of storm Iwa and Iniki. Analysis of genetic structure reveals a greater similarity between individuals inhabiting the northern and western part of the island to RJF than individuals from the eastern part of the island. These results point to the possibility of introgression events between feral chickens and the wild chickens in areas surrounding the Koke’e State Park and the Alaka’i plateau, posited as two of the major RJF reservoirs in the island. Furthermore, we have inferred haplotype blocks from pooled data to determine the most plausible source of the feral population. We identify a clear contribution from RJF and layer chickens of the White Leghorn (WL) breed. This work provides independent confirmation of the traditional hypothesis surrounding the origin of the feral populations and draws attention to the possibility of introgression of domestic alleles into the wild reservoir.

Additional Comments

Open access funding provided by Linköping University. Computations were enabled by resources provided by the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) at the Uppsala SNIC Centre, partially funded by the Swedish Research Council through grant agreement no. 2018-05973. The project was supported by the European Research Council (Consolidator grant FERALGEN 772874), the Swedish Research Council (VR), the Linköping University Neuro-network and the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement No. DBI-0939454.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

ORCID ID

0000-0002-1270-6727

ResearcherID

J-8619-2012

DOI

10.1038/s41437-022-00589-z

Peer Reviewed

Included in

Biology Commons

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.