Search

Chronic wasting disease (CWD) is a fatal disease of North American cervids that was first detected in a wild, hunter-shot deer in Saskatchewan along the border with Alberta in Canada in 2000. Spatially explicit models for assessing factors affecting disease detection are needed to guide surveillance and control programs. Spatio-temporal patterns in CWD prevalence can be complicated by variation in individual infection probability and sampling biases. We assessed hunter harvest data of mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) and white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) during the early phases of an outbreak in Saskatchewan (i.e., 2002-2007) for targeting the detection of CWD by defining (1) where to look, and (2) how much effort to use. First, we accounted for known demographic heterogeneities in infection to model the probability, P(E), that a harvested deer was infected with CWD given characteristics of the harvest location. Second, in areas where infected deer were harvested we modelled the probability, P(D), of the hunter harvest re-detecting CWD within sample units of varying size (9-54 km(2)) given the demographics of harvested deer and time since first detection in the study area. Heterogeneities in host infection were consistent with those reported elsewhere: mule deer 3.7 timeswhite-tailed deer, males 1.8 timesfemales, and quadratically related to age in both sexes. P(E) increased with number of years since the first detection in our study area (2002) and proximity to known disease sources, and also varied with distance to the South Saskatchewan River and small creek drainages, terrain ruggedness, and extent of agriculture lands within a 3 km radius of the harvest. The majority (75%) of new CWD-positive deer from our sample were found within 20 km of infected deer harvested in the previous year, while approximately 10% were greater than 40 km. P(D) modelled at 18 km(2) was best supported, but for all scales, P(D) depended on the number of harvested deer and time since the first infected deer was harvested. Within an 18 km(2) sampling unit, there was an 80% probability of detecting a CWD-positive deer with 16 harvested deer five years after the initial infected harvest. Identifying where and how much to sample to detect CWD can improve targeted surveillance programs early in the outbreak of the disease when based on hunter harvest.

Spatial patterns of genetic variation in interacting species can identify shared features that are important to gene flow and can elucidate co-evolutionary relationships. We assessed concordance in spatial genetic variation between the mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae) and one of its fungal symbionts, Grosmanniaclavigera, in western Canada using neutral genetic markers. We examined how spatial heterogeneity affects genetic variation within beetles and fungi and developed a novel integrated landscape genetics approach to assess reciprocal genetic influences between species using constrained ordination. We also compared landscape genetic models built using Euclidean distances based on allele frequencies to traditional pair-wise Fst. Both beetles and fungi exhibited moderate levels of genetic structure over the total study area, low levels of structure in the south, and more pronounced fungal structure in the north. Beetle genetic variation was associated with geographic location while that of the fungus was not. Pinevolume and climate explained beetle genetic variation in the northern region of recent outbreak expansion. Reciprocal genetic relationships were only detectedin the south where there has been alonger history of beetle infestations. The Euclidean distance and Fst-based analyses resulted in similar models in the north and over the entire study area, but differences between methods in the south suggest that genetic distances measures should be selected based on ecological and evolutionary contexts. The integrated landscape genetics framework we present is powerful, general, and can be applied to other systems to quantify the biotic and abiotic determinants of spatial genetic variation within and among taxa.

Knowledge of relatedness between pairs of individuals plays an important role in many research areas including evolutionary biology, quantitative genetics, and conservation. Pairwise relatedness estimation methods based on genetic data from highly variable molecular markers are now used extensively as a substitute for pedigrees. Although the sampling variance of the estimators has been intensively studied for the most common simple genetic relationships, such as unrelated, half- and full-sib, or parent–offspring, little attention has been paid to the average performance of the estimators, by which we mean the performance across all pairs of individuals in a sample. Here we apply two measures to quantify the average performance: first, misclassification rates between pairs of genetic relationships and, second, the proportion of variance explained in the pairwise relatedness estimates by the true population relatedness composition (i.e., the frequencies of different relationships in the population). Using simulated data derived from exceptionally good quality marker and pedigree data from five long-term projects of natural populations, we demonstrate that the average performance depends mainly on the population relatedness composition and may be improved by the marker data quality only within the limits of the population relatedness composition. Our five examples of vertebrate breeding systems suggest that due to the remarkably low variance in relatedness across the population, marker-based estimates may often have low power to address research questions of interest.

Most mainstream scientists believe that few species of large mammal remain to be discovered. Nevertheless, there are countless unverified reports of a large, non-human, bipedal primate from Asia (the ‘Yeti’) and North America (‘Sasquatch’ or ‘Bigfoot’). Thus far, none of these reports has been convincingly verified by modern scientific methods [1]. However, new species inhabiting remote areas are occasionally described that were previously known only from local and traditional knowledge. The most recently described large mammal could be the sao la Pseudoryx nghetinhensis, which became known to science in 1992 from three sets of horns found in the possession of hunters in the Vu Quang Nature Reserve in Vietnam [2].