Biology Faculty Articles
Title
Genome-Wide Evidence Reveals that African and Eurasian Golden Jackals are Distinct Species
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
8-17-2015
Publication Title
Current Biology
ISSN
0960-9822
Volume
25
Issue/No.
16
First Page
2158
Last Page
2165
Abstract
The golden jackal of Africa (Canis aureus) has long been considered a conspecific of jackals distributed throughout Eurasia, with the nearest source populations in the Middle East. However, two recent reports found that mitochondrial haplotypes of some African golden jackals aligned more closely to gray wolves (Canis lupus) [ 1, 2 ], which is surprising given the absence of gray wolves in Africa and the phenotypic divergence between the two species. Moreover, these results imply the existence of a previously unrecognized phylogenetically distinct species despite a long history of taxonomic work on African canids. To test the distinct-species hypothesis and understand the evolutionary history that would account for this puzzling result, we analyzed extensive genomic data including mitochondrial genome sequences, sequences from 20 autosomal loci (17 introns and 3 exon segments), microsatellite loci, X- and Y-linked zinc-finger protein gene (ZFX and ZFY) sequences, and whole-genome nuclear sequences in African and Eurasian golden jackals and gray wolves. Our results provide consistent and robust evidence that populations of golden jackals from Africa and Eurasia represent distinct monophyletic lineages separated for more than one million years, sufficient to merit formal recognition as different species: C. anthus (African golden wolf) and C. aureus (Eurasian golden jackal). Using morphologic data, we demonstrate a striking morphologic similarity between East African and Eurasian golden jackals, suggesting parallelism, which may have misled taxonomists and likely reflects uniquely intense interspecific competition in the East African carnivore guild. Our study shows how ecology can confound taxonomy if interspecific competition constrains size diversification.
Additional Comments
FCT contract #s: IF/00564/2012, IF/00459/2013; National Geographic Society grant #s: CRE 7629-04, CRE 8412-08
NSUWorks Citation
Koepfli, Klaus-Peter; John Pollinger; Raquel Godinho; Jacqueline Robinson; Amanda Lea; Sarah Hendricks; Rena M. Schweizer; Olaf Thalmann; Pedro Salva; Zhenxin Fan; Andrey A. Yurchenko; Pavel Dobrynin; Alexey Makunin; James A. Cahill; Beth Shapiro; Francisco Alvares; Jose C. Brito; Eli Geffen; Jennifer A. Leonard; Kristofer M. Helgen; Warren E. Johnson; Stephen J. O'Brien; Blaire Van Valkenburgh; and Robert K. Wayne. 2015. "Genome-Wide Evidence Reveals that African and Eurasian Golden Jackals are Distinct Species." Current Biology 25, (16): 2158-2165. https://nsuworks.nova.edu/cnso_bio_facarticles/420
ORCID ID
0000-0001-7353-8301
ResearcherID
N-1726-2015
Comments
©2015 Elsevier Ltd. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.