Demographic changes in Pleistocene sea turtles were driven by past sea level fluctuations affecting feeding habitat availability.

ABSTRACT: Pleistocene environmental changes are generally assumed to have dramatically affected species' demography via changes in habitat availability, but this is challenging to investigate due to our limited knowledge of how Pleistocene ecosystems changed through time. Here, we tracked changes in shallow marine habitat availability resulting from Pleistocene sea level fluctuations throughout the last glacial cycle (120-14 thousand years ago; kya) and assessed correlations with past changes in genetic diversity inferred from genome-wide SNPs, obtained via ddRAD sequencing, in Caribbean hawksbill turtles, which feed in coral reefs commonly found in shallow tropical waters. We found sea level regression resulted in an average 75% reduction in shallow marine habitat availability during the last glaci

SUBMITTER: van der Zee JP 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9299637 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature