Document Type
Article
Publication Date
4-2019
Abstract
The Painted Bunting Passerina ciris is a Neotropical songbird which breeds primarily in the USA during the summer and migrates to Mexico, Central America, southern Florida and the Caribbean over the winter. Male Painted Buntings are brightly coloured, which makes them highly sought after as pets, particularly in Mexico, Central America and Europe. We used short sequence repeats (microsatellite DNA) to investigate the population genetic structure of the Painted Bunting and its implications in conservation management of migratory populations. We found a detectable level of population differentiation as revealed by pairwise FST and RST comparisons and Bayesian clustering analyses, with strong support for differentiation between eastern and western Painted Buntings (e.g. Oklahoma and Georgia FST = 0.1; P = 0.005; RST = 0.18; P = 0.04) in accordance with previous mitochondrial DNA analysis. We recovered additional support for two sub-groups within the western clade. While linking migrant songbirds captured outside of the USA to their breeding populations remains a challenge, we show that natural levels of population genetic differentiation can be detected via microsatellite DNA markers and exploited in migratory connectivity studies. We also demonstrate the potential utility of our low-cost markers for population identification of birds recovered from the pet trade by screening a small subset of samples (n = 5) collected as part of wildlife tracking. We discuss the implications of our results for future efforts to understand patterns of population decline in Painted Buntings more generally, as well as how we might expand this methodology to combat illegal pet-trade activity in this and other songbird species.
Recommended Citation
Contina, Andrea, Jose L. Alcantara, Eli S. Bridge, Jeremy D. Ross, William F. Oakley, Jeffrey F. Kelly, and Kristen C. Ruegg. "Genetic structure of the Painted Bunting and its implications for conservation of migratory populations." Ibis 161, no. 2 (2019): 372-386. https://doi.org/10.1111/ibi.12641
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Publication Title
Ibis
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1111/ibi.12641
Comments
© 2018 The Authors Ibis published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Ornithologists’ Union.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.