Unexpected gene-flow patterns highlight importance of peripheral populations of the world’s smallest penguin — ASN Events
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Unexpected gene-flow patterns highlight importance of peripheral populations of the world’s smallest penguin (#219)

Jennifer JK Sinclair 1 , Belinda Cannell 2 , Stuart Bradley 2 , Ron Wooller 2 , Bill Sherwin 1
  1. UNSW, Sydney, NSW, Australia
  2. Sustainability, Environmental and Life Sciences, Murdoch University, Murdoch, WA, Australia

Little Penguins, the smallest member of the Penguin family, are endemic to Australia and New Zealand and are threatened by urbanisation and climate change.  Human disturbance and the introduction of feral pests and invasive weeds have resulted in habitat reduction throughout the Little Penguin’s range, restricting most extant populations to coastal islands free of predators and large human settlement.  In Western Australia, the population at Penguin Island, in the Perth metropolitan region, is the northernmost extent of the Little Penguin distribution and hosts the largest colony of Little Penguins in WA.  Predictions that rapid environmental and climatic changes will occur over the next century2  coupled with expanding urbanisation in the region make it critical to gain an understanding of Little Penguin range limitations so that we are better able to predict future biodiversity outcomes.  In this study we performed a fine-scale population genetic analysis of little penguins in Western Australia in order to understand the genetic status and conservation value of the Penguin Island population.  Source populations located near Esperance WA were identified by multilocus and mtDNA genetic analyses supporting evidence that little penguins originated in the south1,3  and small founder populations expanded northward to settle the Perth region. Contrary to our expectations genetic estimates of dispersal between Perth populations at the periphery of the little penguin distribution and south coast Western Australian populations near the core of little penguin distribution revealed biased dispersal with greater dispersal from Perth to the south. One plausible explanation is that gene flow is now restricted by oceanographic currents and could be affected by increasing sea surface temperatures and ENSO events.  Furthermore, at Penguin Island, mortality and reproductive success appear to be influenced by ENSO events4.  These results indicate that conservation of the Penguin Island colony depends largely on ensuring management practices address factors influenced by climate variability and connectivity with neighbouring penguin colonies.

  1. Banks JC, Mitchell AD, Waas JR, Paterson AM (2002) An unexpected pattern of molecular divergence within the blue penguin (Eudyptula minor) complex. Notornis, 49, 29-38.
  2. IPCC (2013) Climate Change 2013: The Physical Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK and New York, NY, USA.
  3. Peucker AJ, Dann P, Burridge CP (2009) Range-wide phylogeography of the Little Penguin (Eudyptula minor): evidence of long-distance dispersal. The Auk, 126, 397-408.
  4. Cannell, Belinda L., Chambers, Lynda E., Wooller, Ron D., and Bradley, J. Stuart (2012). Poorer breeding by little penguins near Perth, Western Australia is correlated with above average sea surface temperatures and a stronger Leeuwin Current. Marine and Freshwater Research 63, 914–925.