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Multi-Locus Evidence Of A Late Pleistocene Divergence And Sex-Biased Dispersal In The North American Wood Duck (Aix Sponsa), Christopher T. Bigley
Multi-Locus Evidence Of A Late Pleistocene Divergence And Sex-Biased Dispersal In The North American Wood Duck (Aix Sponsa), Christopher T. Bigley
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The Pleistocene was characterized by fluctuations in climate causing repeated advances and retreats of glacial ice. The advancing ice sheets caused habitat fragmentation which initiated population divergence and speciation events between eastern and western avian populations within northern temperate forests. Based on mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) control region sequences, North American Wood Duck (Aix sponsa) populations fit this model of divergence. However, mtDNA is maternally inherited, and thus may not reflect the genomic history of this species, because of male biased-dispersal, selection, or stochastic lineage sorting. To test the "Late Pleistocene divergence" hypothesis, I sequenced 11 independent nuclear introns (nuDNA) for …