Figure 1.
A map depicting the former and current range of the dama gazelle (adapted from [14]).
Wild sampling sites and places of origin for the captive populations are depicted. The suggested subspecies boundaries according to different authors are listed (see in text for detail).
Table 1.
Details of the 124 samples in this study and the populations that they originated from.
Figure 2.
Variation in pelage coloration in different populations listed from northwest to southeast.
a&b) Captive mhorr at Al Ain (a) and Frankfurt Zoo (b) which are descended from four founders caught in the Dora-Hagunia and Tichla-Bir Ganduz area of Western Sahara in 1958 (in the case of Al Ain zoo the origin is unrecorded, but it is highly likely that this is where they come from). c) animals from the population in Termit, Niger. d) animals from the population in Manga, Chad. e) animals from the population in Ouadi Rimé-Ouadi Achim, Chad. f) animals from the captive population at Al Ain Zoo, most likely descended from 20 founders taken from the wild in around Ouadi Haouach close to Ouadi Rimé-Ouadi Achim, Chad. Animals from the most north-westerly populations have the most extensive dark coloration, which descends down the legs. Moving to the south and east, this dark coloration fades upwards and forwards. Note that there is also phenotypic variation within populations, for example the width of the thigh marking differs in Manga and the animals in OROA exhibit presence or absence of the ham-shaped mark on the thigh [15].
Figure 3.
Bar chart of control region haplotypes (A–O & R) found at different sampling sites in this study.
Sites are enumerated by collecting locality (see Table 1) and putative subspecies; R (N. d. ruficollis), D (N. d. dama), M (N. d. mhorr). Wild and captive populations are separated by a red line. Particularly striking, but not unexpected, is the higher haplotype diversity in the samples from wild populations (OROA_R, MANGA_R,TERMIT_D) than in samples from captive and captive-derived mhorr populations (Ain_M, EEP_M, SEN_M, SAF_M) and captive ruficollis populations (Ain_R, Mar_R). No haplotypes are shared between wild populations, or between wild and captive populations.
Figure 4.
Evolutionary relationships at different genes a) Tree based on 560 bp of control region and b) 421 bp of cytochrome B.
In each case Neighbourhood joining (left) and Bayesian Inference of Phylogeny via MrBayes (right) were conducted according to the conditions listed in the methods section. The putative ruficollis subspecies exhibits polyphyly at the control region (and cytochrome b, compare with Figure 5). * Captive populations have been combined (see Table 1).
Figure 5.
Haplotype network of the control region haplotypes present in this study.
Each haplotype is colour coded according to population of origin, and single base-pair step-wise mutations between haplotypes are colour coded according to their connection limit. Relatedness of haplotypes does not correspond to subspecies divisions or geographical structure.
Table 2.
Matrix of pair-wise mutational differences between control region haplotypes.
Table 3.
Matrix of pair-wise mutational differences between cytochrome b haplotypes.