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Looking to the past and the future: were the Madeira River rapids a geographical barrier to the boto (Cetacea: Iniidae)?

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Abstract

In the present study we tested if a series of 18 rapids on the upper Madeira River form an effective barrier to gene flow, and in particular if they delimit the distribution of the boto Inia boliviensis—which it is believed to occurs only in the Bolivian sub-basin, above the rapids—and I. geoffrensis, which occurs throughout the Amazon basin and below the upper Madeira River rapids. We analyzed 125 individuals from the Madeira River basin sampled from upstream and downstream of the rapids. As the two species are morphologically similar, we used diagnostic molecular characters from known reference specimens to assign individuals to species. We observed that all individuals of Inia from the Bolivian sub-basin up to almost the mouth of the Madeira River belong to the species I. boliviensis. Therefore we concluded that the rapids do not delimit the distribution of I. boliviensis upstream and I. geoffrensis downstream of the rapids as previously hypothesized. Since we registered I. boliviensis along almost the entire length of the Madeira River, we estimated gene flow, time of divergence and effective population sizes of the upstream (Bolivian) and downstream (Madeira River) groups of I. boliviensis using IMa2. We concluded that gene flow is uni-directional from the upstream to the downstream group. Divergence time between the two groups was estimated to have occurred ~122 thousand years ago. The coalescent effective population size for the upstream group was estimated at ~131 thousand individuals, while for the downstream group it was estimated at ~102 thousand individuals. Recently two dams have been constructed in the region of the rapids; neither has a mechanism that will maintain connectivity between the upstream and downstream regions, and together with anthropogenic alterations to the hydrodynamic regime and ecology of the river will likely pose serious long-term and short-term consequences for I. boliviensis and other aquatic taxa.

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Notes

  1. After this paper was accepted, a third species Inia araguaiaensis was described from the Araguaia-Tocantins River basin (Hrbek et al. 2014).

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by grants from National Counsel of Technological and Scientific Development (CNPq) PPG7 557090/2005-0, CT-Amazônia 575603/2008-9 and Universal 483408/2009-3 and 482253/2012-6 to IPF, CNPq/Universal-482662/2013-1 to TH and the Scott Neotropical Fund and the Society for Marine Mammalogy to WG. Collecting permits were provided to IPF by IBAMA/ICMBIO (No. 11325-1 and No. 13462-1). The protocol for handling and removing tissue samples from live animals was approved by the Committee on the Ethics of Animal Use (Comissão de Ética do Uso de Animais—CEUA) of the National Research Institute of the Amazon (INPA).TH and IPF were supported by a Bolsa de Pesquisa scholarship from CNPq during the study and WG by a CNPq fellowship. We are grateful to the team of the Hydrogeochemistry laboratory of the Federal University of Rondônia (UNIR). We thank all the fishermen involved in the capture of the animals, Valéria Machado and Mario Nunes for their help in the field and the laboratory, and Luiz Cleyton Holanda Lobato for sharing his detailed knowledge of the Madeira-Mamoré-Guaporé River system.

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  1. Laboratório de Evolução e Genética Animal (LEGAL), Departamento de Biologia, Universidade Federal do Amazonas, Av. Rodrigo Octávio Jordão Ramos, 3000, 69077-000, Manaus, Amazonas, Brazil

    Waleska Gravena, Izeni P. Farias & Tomas Hrbek

  2. Laboratório de Mamíferos Aquáticos, Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia, Av. André Araújo, 2936, 69011-970, Manaus, Amazonas, Brazil

    Waleska Gravena & Vera M. F. da Silva

  3. Coleção de Mamíferos, Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia, Av. André Araújo, 2936, 69011-970, Manaus, Amazonas, Brazil

    Maria N. F. da Silva

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  1. Waleska Gravena
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  2. Izeni P. Farias
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  3. Maria N. F. da Silva
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  4. Vera M. F. da Silva
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  5. Tomas Hrbek
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Correspondence to Tomas Hrbek.

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Gravena, W., Farias, I.P., da Silva, M.N.F. et al. Looking to the past and the future: were the Madeira River rapids a geographical barrier to the boto (Cetacea: Iniidae)?. Conserv Genet 15, 619–629 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10592-014-0565-4

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