Abstract
Differences in genetic diversity were tested in ground beetles, Carabus hemprichi (Coleoptera, Carabidae), from microclimatically opposite slopes at a Mediterranean microsite, "Evolution Canyon" at Lower Nahal Oren, Mount Carmel, Israel. We predicted that the population on the south-facing slope (SF) has been selected for higher genetic diversity, due to a spatiotemporally wider ecological microclimatic niche. Twenty individuals from SF, 16 from the north-facing slope (NF), and 12 from the valley bottom were tested for variation in 22 putative allozymic loci. Numbers of alleles per locus (A), allelic polymorphism (P), observed heterozygosity (H), and gene diversity (He) were higher on SF as expected; the SF/NF ratios being: A = 2.2/2.0, P = 0.91/0.82, H = 0.179/0.163, and He = 0.399/0.369. Although the differences were not statistically significant in multilocus comparison, we found significant deviations from 0 in genetic distance between the slopes in four loci.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 403-409 |
| Number of pages | 7 |
| Journal | Israel Journal of Zoology |
| Volume | 42 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| State | Published - 1996 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We thank for financial support the Ministry of Science for grants 1426 and 4147, the Israel Discount Bank Chair of Evolutionary Biology, and the Ancell-Teicher Research Foundation for Genetics and Molecular Evolution. Tomas Pavlicek is grateful to the Budgeting and Planning Committee of the Council of Higher Education (Israel) for a postdoctoral grant in 1992/1993. We are grateful to Professor Karel Hurka from the Department of Zoology, Charles University, Czech Republic for taxonomic identification of C. hemprichi. We thank A. Beiles for assistance in the statistical analyses, and L. Blaustein for commenting on the manuscript.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Animal Science and Zoology