Our objectives were to refine the phylogeographic assessment puma sneakers within South America and to investigate the demographic history of pumas using a coalescent approach. Our results extend previous phylogeographic findings, reassessing the delimitation of historical population units in South America and demonstrating that this species experienced a considerable demographic expansion in the Holocene, ca. 8,000 years ago. Our analyses indicate that this expansion occurred in South America, prior to the hypothesized re-colonization of North America, which was therefore inferred to be even more recent.
In addition to expanding the geographic coverage of South American regions to refine inferences on patterns of matrilineal subdivision, we have performed novel analyses on puma demographic history, which revealed consistent evidence of a recent population expansion in South puma ignite America, prior to re-colonization of North America.We obtained blood and tissue samples from 77 pumas including wild individuals captured during field-ecology projects, caught by farmers or road-killed, as well as captive animals with known geographic origin ( Table S1 ). puma bts
Additionally, to investigate spatial patterns of genetic structure in pumas we assessed the correlation between genetic and geographic distances for all pairs of sampled individuals using a Mantel test ( Mantel, 1967 ). This was performed with the program Alleles in Space (AIS) ( Miller, 2005 ), employing the proportion of differences ( i.e. a p-distance equivalent) to generate the genetic distance matrix and 10,000 permutations to assess statistical significance. We also employed AIS to perform a spatial autocorrelation analysis of puma basketball the data set, using 11 distance classes, equalized sample sizes across classes, and 10,000 permutations to assess significance.
Finally, we conducted a set of analyses to investigate the demographic history of pumas. We performed neutrality tests (Tajima's D, Fu & Li' D* and F*, Fu's Fs) with DnaSP, as well as a mismatch distribution analysis ( Rogers and Harpending, 1992 ; Schneider and Excoffier, 1999 ) with Arlequin. In addition, we used the program Beast 1.6.1 ( Drummond and Rambaut, 2007 ) to perform estimates of coalescence times and past demography. We defined the best model of nucleotide substitution for our data set, which was the HKY ( Hasegawa et al. , 1985 ) G model, using the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC, Akaike, 1974 ) implemented in jModelTest 0.1 ( Posada, 2008 ).
The final run was based on 10 8 MCMC generations, puma outlet canada with samples taken every 10 4 steps, and the first 10 4 steps removed as burn-in.The second set of Beast analyses aimed to infer the time of the most recent common ancestor ( t MRCA ) of different groups of samples, as well as to reconstruct the demographic history of pumas by estimating past fluctuations in population size via the Bayesian Skyline Plot (BSP) approach ( Drummond et al. , 2005 ). We assumed a Bayesian skyline tree prior and a strict molecular clock, whose evolutionary rate was based on the estimate derived from the first round of analyses.