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POPULATION DIFFERENTIATION - Lesser Prairie Chicken
Collaborators:
Christian Hagan, Kansas State University
Funding Partners:
Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks, Kansas State University
Summary:
The lesser prairie-chicken (Tympanuchus pallidicinctus)
has sustained marked
reductions in suitable habitat over the past 100 years. What remains is
a highly fragmented distribution throughout the species range. The remaining
habitat is widely used for petroleum exploration and extraction, cattle
grazing, powerline easements, and the generation of electricity. The cumulative
loss of habitat and declining population trends lead to the warranted
but precluded threatened listing under the Endangered Species Act (USFWS
2002). Despite a slowing in the rate of habitat loss, populations have
continued to decline range-wide. It has been hypothesized that intrinsic
factors (e.g., disease, parasites, low genetic diversity), may be contributing
to the observed population trends. Such was the case of a greater prairie-chicken
(T. cupido) population in Illinois that sustained a population
bottleneck. The demographic and genetic consequences were reduced fertility
and heterozygosity, respectively (Bouzat et al. 1998). Could similar processes
be at work with the lesser prairie-chicken? Van Den Bussche et al. (2002)
found reasonable levels of heterozygosity in lesser prairie-chickens in
Oklahoma and New Mexico using mitochondrial DNA sequence and nuclear micorsatellite
analyses, suggesting that genetic variation is not limiting. We expand
on the work of Van Den Bussche et al. (2002) to include 3 populations
from Kansas and 1 from southeastern Colorado.
