How do you determine the paternity of elephant seal pups?
Posted February 8th, 2008Question from Dave Weissman :
I know that due to a genetic bottleneck years ago, most elephant seals today are almost genetically identical. Yet during paternity studies, some 90% of the alpha male's ladies are fertilized by him. How was this determined? a nuclear DNA gene? allozyme comparisons?
Thanks for the answer.
Answered by JasonHassrickWe asked Carlos Garza, at the Southwest Fisheries Science Center to answer this question. This is what he told us:I believe that this question refers to a 2003 study by Fabiani, Hoelzel, Galimberti and Muelbe regarding paternity in SOUTHERN elephant seals. The extreme bottleneck was in NORTHERN elephant seals, which are a different species.Although I worked on a large paternity study in northern elephant seals a decade ago, we never finished it because of problems with not enough genetic variability in the nuclear DNA markers (and some investigator personality issues) and I don't believe anyone else has succeeded either. However, I have doctoral student who may attempt it in Mexico over the next few years.So at present, we don't know whether male reproductive success in northern elephant seals is as skewed as observed in that one study of the southern species.I don't exactly understand why a genetic bottleneck would have any bearing on skewed reproductive success or mating strategies.
