PHYLOGEOGRAPHIC ANALYSIS OF NORTHERN YELLOW BATS, DASYPTERUS INTERMEDIUS, BY MOLECULAR ANALYSIS
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Abstract
Northern yellow bats (Dasypterus intermedius) are tree-roosting bats in the family Vespertilionidae comprised of two subspecies: D. intermedius intermedius and D. intermedius floridanus distributed in North and Central America. The two subspecies lineages are thought to be geographically separated but this has never been tested with a molecular approach. In this study, mitochondrial sequence data from 38 D. intermedius and nuclear microsatellite data from 92 D. intermedius (across 8 loci) from across their range were used to test the hypothesis that genetically defined groups will correspond geographically with the two morphologically-defined subspecies. Though high levels of divergence of the mitochondrial sequence (11.6%) resulted in clusters that corresponded to geographic origin, no genetic structure in the population based on nuclear markers was recovered. This study suggests that D. intermedius has a single continuous population with gene flow between the two subspecies and relatively high genetic diversity levels (H0=0.621).