Genetic analyses favour an ancient and natural origin of elephants on Borneo

Reeta Sharma*, Benoit Goossens, Rasmus Heller, Rita Rasteiro, Nurzhafarina Othman, Michael W. Bruford, Lounès Chikhi

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticle (Academic Journal)peer-review

23 Citations (Scopus)
388 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

The origin of the elephant on the island of Borneo remains elusive. Research has suggested two alternative hypotheses: the Bornean elephant stems either from a recent introduction in the 17th century or from an ancient colonization several hundreds of thousands years ago. Lack of elephant fossils has been interpreted as evidence for a very recent introduction, whereas mtDNA divergence from other Asian elephants has been argued to favor an ancient colonization. We investigated the demographic history of Bornean elephants using full-likelihood and approximate Bayesian computation analyses. Our results are at odds with both the recent and ancient colonization hypotheses, and favour a third intermediate scenario. We find that genetic data favour a scenario in which Bornean elephants experienced a bottleneck during the last glacial period, possibly as a consequence of the colonization of Borneo, and from which it has slowly recovered since. Altogether the data support a natural colonization of Bornean elephants at a time when large terrestrial mammals could colonise from the Sunda shelf when sea levels were much lower. Our results are important not only in understanding the unique history of the colonization of Borneo by elephants, but also for their long-term conservation.

Original languageEnglish
Article number880
Number of pages11
JournalScientific Reports
Volume8
Issue number1
Early online date17 Jan 2018
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Dec 2018

Keywords

  • genetics
  • Population genetics

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