Journal of Heredity Advance Access originally published online on July 14, 2006
Journal of Heredity 2006 97(4):389-402; doi:10.1093/jhered/esl011
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Different Post-Pleistocene Histories of Eurasian Parids
From the Bell Museum of Natural History, University of Minnesota, St Paul, MN 55108 (Pavlova and Zink); Burke Museum and Department of Zoology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195-3010 (Rohwer); and Department of Biological Sciences, University of Alaska, Anchorage, AL 99508 (Drovetski). Alexandra Pavlova is now at the School of Biological Sciences, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria 3800, Australia
Address correspondence to R. M. Zink, 100 Ecology Building, 1987 Upper Buford Circle, St Paul, MN 55108, or e-mail: zinkx003{at}umn.edu.
Previous phylogeographic studies of the great tit (Parus major) and the willow tit (Parus montanus) found a general absence of phylogeographic structure for both species and suggested that each species underwent range contraction during the last Ice Age and survived in relatively low numbers, P. major in southern Europe and P. montanus in southeastern Asia. However, prior studies did not sample the entire range of either species. We analyzed sequence data for the complete mitochondrial ND2 gene from 87 P. major and 139 P. montanus from 15 new Eurasian localities, both to test prior conclusions and to provide better coverage of each species' range. Our analyses confirmed the absence of phylogeographic structure in P. major and P. montanus and supported the prior refuge hypothesis for P. major. For P. montanus, we concluded that besides surviving the Ice Age in southeastern Asia, as previously hypothesized, it apparently sustained a relatively large population in northern Eurasian riverine thickets and then expanded eastward. Genetic diversity was low in P. major (
= 0.0012, h = 0.64) and moderate in P. montanus ( = 0.0021, h = 0.88), suggesting higher long-term effective population sizes and the older ages of populations in P. montanus. If molecular substitution rates are similar, P. montanus colonized its current Eurasian range earlier than P. major. Differences between prior studies and ours likely result from sampling gaps in earlier studies.