Genetic structure of the endangered red-crowned cranes in Hokkaido, Japan and conservation implications

Low Genetic Variation of Red-Crowned Cranes on Hokkaido Island, Japan, Over the Hundred Years

“…The higher frequencies of haplotypes Gj1 and Gj2 were in agreement with those in previous reports (Miura et al, 2013a;Sugimoto et al, 2015). Sugimoto et al (2015) reported no apparent spatial genetic structures in the current island population from microsatellite and mtDNA analyses. The present study also showed a low genetic variation of the island population, and that this state has continued for about 100 years.…”

“…In the present study, three haplotypes (Gj1, Gj2 and Gj13) were identified from the island population. Haplotypes Gj1 and Gj2 were frequently found among individuals of the island population (Hasegawa et al, 1999;Miura et al, 2013a;Sugimoto et al, 2015). In contrast, in the present study, haplotype Gj13 was identified for the first time as a novel haplotype from a single stuffed specimen and one contemporary sample.…”

“…Hasegawa et al (1999) reported 18 polymorphic sites in 418 base-pairs (bp) of the control region (CR) 2 in mtDNA to determine haplotypes. Previous mtDNA analyses identified only two haplotypes in the island population, whereas another 10 haplotypes were found in the continental population (Hasegawa et al, 1999;Miura et al, 2013;Sugimoto et al, 2015). However, our previous study (Akiyama et al, 2017) reported that the mtDNA of the red-crowned crane contains a duplicated region, including the control region; the existence of orthologs (CR1) was not addressed in previous studies.…”

“…We therefore focused on the overlapping region to analyze mtDNA haplotypes of red-crowned cranes. In addition, Sugimoto et al (2015) analyzed microsatellite variation and found no regional genetic differences within the island populations. This also suggested that the genetic structure of the island population has changed as an effect of the increased number of cranes on Hokkaido (Masatomi et al, 2014).…”

The Demoiselle crane (Anthropoides virgo) population genetic structure in Russia

“…Significant level of genetic differentiation due to the gene flow limitation has been revealed among the subspecies of the non-migratory Sarus crane Grus antigone by microsatellite loci (F ST = 0.210) (Jones et al, 2005) and isolated populations of the non-migratory Wattled crane Bugeranus carunculatus both by microsatellite loci (F ST = 0.100) and control region of mtDNA (F ST = 0.450) (Jones et al, 2006). In migratory crane species, the genetic differentia-tion of populations including isolated ones was usually low by different molecular markers not only in the wide-spread Eurasian crane G. grus (Haase, Ilyashenko, 2012;Mudrik et al, 2015) but also in the rare species like the Red-crowned crane G. japonensis having the migratory and non-migratory populations (Hasegawa et al, 1999(Hasegawa et al, , 2000Sugimoto et al, 2015), the Siberian crane G. leucogeranus having two isolated populations (Ponomarev et al, 2004), and the Hooded crane G. monacha (Zhang et al, 2012). As for the Sandhill crane G. canadensis, the species divided to six subspecies, shows strong genetic differentiation (F ST = 0.480) between two mitochondrial lineages: the first one was composed of only one Table 3.…”