Molecular evidence of conspecificity of South African hares conventionally considered Lepus capensis L., 1758

Abstract

Conventionally, Lepus capensis is considered to range across large parts of Africa, the Middle East, Central and Far East Asia. However, a centmorphological study restricts cape hares tentatively to a small range in the Western Cape Region of South Africa and groups all other L. capensis-type hares from South Africa in to a new species: L. centralis. Here, we studied molecular relationships among L. capensis-type hares from South Africa. Phenotypically and morphologically the individuals matched either the newly described L. capensis or L. centralis. We examined 66 hares for all elicvariation at 13 microsatellite loci and for sequence variation of the hyper variable domain 1 of the mitochondrial control region. All tree-generating analyses of the currently obtained sequences and all South African cape hares equences downloaded from GenBank revealed monophyly when compared to sequences of various other Lepus species. A network analysis indicated close evolutionary relationships between hares of the‘‘L. capensis-phenotype’’ and the‘‘L. centralis-phenotype’’(accordingto Palaciosetal.2008) from the southwest of the Western Cape, relative to their pronounced evolutionary diver gence from all other more central, northern, and north-eastern L. capensis-type hares.F-statis tics, a Bayesianad mixture STRUCTURE model, as well as a principal coordinate analysis of microsatellite data indicated close genetic relationships among all South African L. capensis-type hares studied presently. A coalescence model-based migration analysis for microsatellite alleles indicated gene flow between most of the considered subspecies of cape hare, including L. capensiscapensis and L. capensiscentralis, theoretically sufficient to balance stochastic drift effects. Concordantly, AMOVA models revealed only little effects of partitioning microsatellite variation in to the two suggested morpho-species‘‘L. capensis’’ and‘‘L. centralis’’. Under an ‘‘Interbreeding Species Concept’’(e.g.astrictorrelaxed Biological Species Concept),the current molecular data demonstrate conspecificity of the two proposed morpho-species‘‘L. capensis’’ and‘‘L. centralis’’. Based on the present molecular data the differentiation of subspecies of cape hares from southern Africa is discussed.