Journal
CANADIAN JOURNAL OF ZOOLOGY
Volume 88, Issue 6, Pages 536-545Publisher
CANADIAN SCIENCE PUBLISHING
DOI: 10.1139/Z10-024
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Funding
- Illinois Department of Natural Resources Special Funds Program
- Illinois State Furbearer Fund
- Cooperative Wildlife Research Laboratory, Department of Zoology and Graduate School at Southern Illinois University - Carbondale
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In mammal populations, the spatial and genetic structure can be affected by dispersal, philopatry, and related-ness. Bobcats (Lynx rufus (Schreber, 1777)) are thought to exhibit typical mammalian dispersal behaviour where males disperse and females are philopatric, potentially leading to higher relatedness among females compared with males. We used 10 microsatellite loci to examine population structure and sex-biased dispersal in 146 bobcats sampled in southern Illinois during 1993-2001 using population genetic descriptive statistics, a Bayesian clustering algorithm. relatedness (r(xy)), and autocorrelation analyses. A randomization test demonstrated that female dyads had significantly higher r(xy) values with respect to randomly selected dyads (r(xy) = 0.093 +/- 0.222, P = 0.012) and spatial autocorrelation analyses determined that females in close proximity (<5 km) had a high probability of being related (P = 0.001). Conversely, r(xy) values for males were not different from the null distribution (r(xy) = 0.019 +/- 0.122. P = 0.3158) and no significant relationships were found with spatial autocorrelation analysis. Additionally, it was demonstrated that bobcats in southern Illinois approximated a panmictic population with no obvious barriers to gene flow. The pattern of relatedness observed in this study confirmed that females were philopatric and males dispersed, corroborating existing observational data for this species.
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