5
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: not found

      How old are you? Genet age estimates in a clonal animal.

      Read this article at

      ScienceOpenPublisherPubMed
      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          Foundation species such as redwoods, seagrasses and corals are often long-lived and clonal. Genets may consist of hundreds of members (ramets) and originated hundreds to thousands of years ago. As climate change and other stressors exert selection pressure on species, the demography of populations changes. Yet, because size does not indicate age in clonal organisms, demographic models are missing data necessary to predict the resilience of many foundation species. Here, we correlate somatic mutations with genet age of corals and provide the first, preliminary estimates of genet age in a colonial animal. We observed somatic mutations at five microsatellite loci in rangewide samples of the endangered coral, Acropora palmata (n = 3352). Colonies harboured 342 unique mutations in 147 genets. Genet age ranged from 30 to 838 years assuming a mutation rate of 1.195(-04) per locus per year based on colony growth rates and 236 to 6500 years assuming a mutation rate of 1.542(-05) per locus per year based on sea level changes to habitat availability. Long-lived A. palmata genets imply a large capacity to tolerate past environmental change, and yet recent mass mortality events in A. palmata suggest that capacity is now being frequently exceeded.

          Related collections

          Author and article information

          Journal
          Mol. Ecol.
          Molecular ecology
          Wiley-Blackwell
          1365-294X
          0962-1083
          Nov 2016
          : 25
          : 22
          Affiliations
          [1 ] Department of Biology, The Pennsylvania State University, 208 Mueller Lab, University Park, PA, 16802, USA.
          [2 ] Southeast Fisheries Science Center, National Marine Fisheries Service, 75 Virginia Beach Dr., Miami, FL, 33149, USA.
          [3 ] Marine & Coastal Programs, Dial Cordy & Associates, 90 Osceola Ave, Jacksonville Beach, FL, 32250, USA.
          Article
          10.1111/mec.13865
          27671533
          b5775397-7f74-4b13-a7e0-b9c01214d7c7
          History

          somatic mutations,population dynamics,microsatellite,longevity,clonal

          Comments

          Comment on this article