Genome-wide SNP data suggest complex ancestry of sympatric North Pacific killer whale ecotypes.

ABSTRACT: Three ecotypes of killer whale occur in partial sympatry in the North Pacific. Individuals assortatively mate within the same ecotype, resulting in correlated ecological and genetic differentiation. A key question is whether this pattern of evolutionary divergence is an example of incipient sympatric speciation from a single panmictic ancestral population, or whether sympatry could have resulted from multiple colonisations of the North Pacific and secondary contact between ecotypes. Here, we infer multilocus coalescent trees from >1000 nuclear single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and find evidence of incomplete lineage sorting so that the genealogies of SNPs do not all conform to a single topology. To disentangle whether uncertainty in the phylogenetic inference of the relationships amon

SUBMITTER: Foote AD 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5061921 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature