Revisiting the phylogeography and demography of European badgers (Meles meles) based on broad sampling, multiple markers and simulations.

Although the phylogeography of European mammals has been extensively investigated since the 1990s, many studies were limited in terms of sampling distribution, the number of molecular markers used and the analytical techniques employed, frequently leading to incomplete postglacial recolonisation scenarios. The broad-scale genetic structure of the European badger (Meles meles) is of interest as it may result from historic restriction to glacial refugia and/or recent anthropogenic impact. However, previous studies were based mostly on samples from western Europe, making it difficult to draw robust conclusions about the location of refugia, patterns of postglacial expansion and recent demography. In the present study, continent-wide sampling and analyses with multiple markers provided evidence for two glacial refugia (Iberia and southeast Europe) that contributed to the genetic variation observed in badgers in Europe today. Approximate Bayesian computation provided support for a colonisation of Scandinavia from both Iberian and southeastern refugia. In the whole of Europe, we observed a decline in genetic diversity with increasing latitude, suggesting that the reduced diversity in the peripheral populations resulted from a postglacial expansion processes. Although MSVAR v.1.3 also provided evidence for recent genetic bottlenecks in some of these peripheral populations, the simulations performed to estimate the method's power to correctly infer the past demography of our empirical populations suggested that the timing and severity of bottlenecks could not be established with certainty. We urge caution against trying to relate demographic declines inferred using MSVAR with particular historic or climatological events.

Colonization of Ireland: revisiting 'the pygmy shrew syndrome' using mitochondrial, Y chromosomal and microsatellite markers.

There is great uncertainty about how Ireland attained its current fauna and flora. Long-distance human-mediated colonization from southwestern Europe has been seen as a possible way that Ireland obtained many of its species; however, Britain has (surprisingly) been neglected as a source area for Ireland. The pygmy shrew has long been considered an illustrative model species, such that the uncertainty of the Irish colonization process has been dubbed 'the pygmy shrew syndrome'. Here, we used new genetic data consisting of 218 cytochrome (cyt) b sequences, 153 control region sequences, 17 Y-intron sequences and 335 microsatellite multilocus genotypes to distinguish between four possible hypotheses for the colonization of the British Isles, formulated in the context of previously published data. Cyt b sequences from western Europe were basal to those found in Ireland, but also to those found in the periphery of Britain and several offshore islands. Although the central cyt b haplotype in Ireland was found in northern Spain, we argue that it most likely occurred in Britain also, from where the pygmy shrew colonized Ireland as a human introduction during the Holocene. Y-intron and microsatellite data are consistent with this hypothesis, and the biological traits and distributional data of pygmy shrews argue against long-distance colonization from Spain. The compact starburst of the Irish cyt b expansion and the low genetic diversity across all markers strongly suggests a recent colonization. This detailed molecular study of the pygmy shrew provides a new perspective on an old colonization question.