TY  - JOUR
A1  - Kutschera, Verena Esther
A1  - Lecomte, Nicolas
A1  - Janke, Axel
A1  - Selva, Nuria
A1  - Sokolov, Alexander A.
A1  - Haun, Timm
A1  - Steyer, Katharina Gloria
A1  - Nowak, Carsten
A1  - Hailer, Frank
T1  - A range-wide synthesis and timeline for phylogeographic events in the red fox (Vulpes vulpes)
T2  - BMC evolutionary biology
N2  - Background: Many boreo-temperate mammals have a Pleistocene fossil record throughout Eurasia and North America, but only few have a contemporary distribution that spans this large area. Examples of Holarctic-distributed carnivores are the brown bear, grey wolf, and red fox, all three ecological generalists with large dispersal capacity and a high adaptive flexibility. While the two former have been examined extensively across their ranges, no phylogeographic study of the red fox has been conducted across its entire Holarctic range. Moreover, no study included samples from central Asia, leaving a large sampling gap in the middle of the Eurasian landmass.
Results: Here we provide the first mitochondrial DNA sequence data of red foxes from central Asia (Siberia), and new sequences from several European populations. In a range-wide synthesis of 729 red fox mitochondrial control region sequences, including 677 previously published and 52 newly obtained sequences, this manuscript describes the pattern and timing of major phylogeographic events in red foxes, using a Bayesian coalescence approach with multiple fossil tip and root calibration points. In a 335 bp alignment we found in total 175 unique haplotypes. All newly sequenced individuals belonged to the previously described Holarctic lineage. Our analyses confirmed the presence of three Nearctic- and two Japan-restricted lineages that were formed since the Mid/Late Pleistocene.
Conclusions: The phylogeographic history of red foxes is highly similar to that previously described for grey wolves and brown bears, indicating that climatic fluctuations and habitat changes since the Pleistocene had similar effects on these highly mobile generalist species. All three species originally diversified in Eurasia and later colonized North America and Japan. North American lineages persisted through the last glacial maximum south of the ice sheets, meeting more recent colonizers from Beringia during postglacial expansion into the northern Nearctic. Both brown bears and red foxes colonized Japan’s northern island Hokkaido at least three times, all lineages being most closely related to different mainland lineages. Red foxes, grey wolves, and brown bears thus represent an interesting case where species that occupy similar ecological niches also exhibit similar phylogeographic histories.
KW  - Carnivores
KW  - Divergence time estimate
KW  - Generalist
KW  - mtDNA control region
KW  - Phylogeography
KW  - Vulpes
Y1  - 2013
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/31475
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-314759
SN  - 1471-2148
N1  - © 2013 Kutschera et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
VL  - 13
IS  - 114
PB  - BioMed Central
CY  - London
ER  -