Dados do Trabalho

Título

FRAGMENTATION EFFECTS ON GENETIC STRUCTURE AND DIVERSITY IN THE BROWN SPIDER MONKEY (ATELES HYBRIDUS) IN COLOMBIA

Resumo

Over the last decades factors as habitat loss, overexploitation of natural resources, among others, have had direct impacts on biodiversity. As a consequence, forest fragmentation has increased globally leading to a strong decline of terrestrial vertebrate populations. Habitat fragmentation generatesisolation and constrain social, behavioral and dispersal dynamics. There is consistent evidence that, as a product of isolation, groups within populations become genetically differentiated, increasing inbreeding levels and decreasing their ability to respond to environmental change. In Colombia, forest covers have reduced in about 10% in the last 25 years due to pervasive deforestation. The brown spider monkey (Ateles hybridus) is endemic to Colombia and Venezuela, and is considered as Critically Endangered by the IUCN. We collected noninvasive fecal samples from 95 individuals among five sampling localities: four corresponding to highly fragmented areas and one to continuous forests. Based on a panel of eight microsatellite markers, and accordingly to the obtained FST values between pairs of localities, we did not find evidence of significant genetic structure among locations. The heterozygosity was not significantly higher than the expected implying that there are similar allele frequencies among the studied populations. These results suggest that, despite the substantial levels of fragmentation in the sampling sites, there is no genetic differentiation between groups. However, reports of albino individuals in a specific locality might be a hint of an increase in the inbreeding levels as a product of habitat loss. Therefore, considering that spiders monkeys have one of the slowest life histories of new world primates, have a slow reproductive rate and the lowest intrinsic rates of population increase among neotropical mammals, the period of time of habitat disturbance might not have yet resulted in genetic differentiations expected after habitat fragmentation. 

Financiamento

Banco de la República de Colombia; The Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund; Primate Action Fund.

Palavras-chave

microsatellite; inbreeding; gene flow