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18 results for “Soay sheep”
Genomic prediction in the wild: a case study in Soay sheep
<p>Genomic prediction, the technique whereby an individual's genetic component of their phenotype is estimated from its genome, has revolutionised animal and plant breeding and medical genetics. However, despite being first introduced nearly two decades ago, it has hardly been adopted by the evolutionary genetics community studying wild organisms. Here, genomic prediction is performed on eight traits in a wild population of Soay sheep. The population has been the focus of a >30 year evolutionary ecology study and there is already considerable understanding of the genetic architecture of the focal Mendelian and quantitative traits. We show that the accuracy of genomic prediction is high for all traits, but especially those with loci of large effect segregating. Five different methods are compared, and the two methods that can accommodate zero-effect and large-effect loci in the same model tend to perform best. If the accuracy of genomic prediction is similar in other wild populations, then there is a real opportunity for pedigree-free molecular quantitative genetics research to be enabled in many more wild populations; currently the literature is dominated by studies that have required decades of field data collection to generate sufficiently deep pedigrees. Finally, some of the potential applications of genomic prediction in wild populations are discussed.</p>
Correlates of early reproduction and apparent fitness consequences in male Soay sheep
<p>Life history trade-offs are ubiquitous across species and place constraints on the timing of life history events, including the optimal age at first reproduction. However, studies on lifetime breeding success of male mammals are rare due to sex-biased dispersal and the requirement for genetic paternity inferences. We studied the correlates and apparent fitness consequences of early-life reproduction among males in a free-living population of Soay sheep (<em>Ovis</em> <em>aries</em>) on St Kilda, Scotland. We investigated the factors associated with early breeding success and the apparent consequences of early success for survival and future reproduction. We used genetic paternity inferences, population data and individual morphology measurements collected over 30 years. We found that individuals born in years with low-density population size had the highest early-life breeding success, and singletons were more likely to be successful than twins. Individuals that bred successfully at seven months were more likely to survive their first winter. For individuals that survived their first winter, early breeding success was not associated with later breeding success. Since individual heterogeneity affects breeding success, we believe that variation in individual quality masks costs of early reproduction in this population. Our findings provide no evidence for selection for delayed age at reproduction in male Soay sheep. </p>
Genomic prediction in the wild: a case study in Soay sheep
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Correlates of early reproduction and apparent fitness consequences in male Soay sheep
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Data from: The genetic architecture of helminth-specific immune responses in a wild population of Soay sheep (Ovis aries)
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Vegetation responses to Soay sheep grazing on St Kilda
<p>1. The population of Soay sheep on the island of Hirta in the Outer Hebrides has been the subject of continuous study for more than 35 years. This paper focuses on the botanical aspects of the plant-herbivore interaction, showing how the vegetation affects and is affected by the sheep.</p> <p>2. Grazing impacts on biomass and spatial structure varied across plant communities, with <i>Holcus/Agrostis</i> grasslands affected most and Wet Heath least, consistent with the hypothesis that herbivore impacts are proportional to plant productivity.</p> <p>3. Within plant communities, the negative relationships between sheep numbers and plant abundance (sward height, gap/tussock cover and biomass) were significant in March but not significant in August, as expected if sheep numbers are limited by food supply in winter.</p> <p>4. In most species, flower stem density declined with increasing sheep numbers. There were no examples where unpalatable plants showed increased flowering (e.g. from competitor release under selective grazing).</p> <p>5. Plant production in temporary grazing exclosures (above ground net primary production) was greatest in <i>Holcus/Agrostis</i> grassland (12.6t/ha dry matter/year), lower in <i>Nardus</i> grassland (5.1t/ha/yr) and least in <i>Plantago </i>sward (1.3t/ha/yr) associated with differences in historical nutrient supply and microclimate. </p> <p>6. The net effect of grazing on plant species richness was positive: a few highly palatable species were excluded, but small-scale coexistence of grazing tolerant species was enhanced by defoliation.</p> <p>7. The Soay sheep population fluctuated from 908 (in 1988) to 2208 (in 2009), increasing by an average of 39 extra animals per year over the period 1985-2011. Between 2011 and 2020, the population fluctuated less widely and showed no trend.</p> <p>8. Population change (ln(N(t+1)/N(t)) was inversely density dependent but positively correlated with plant production in <i>Holcus/Agrostis</i> grassland which increased during the study.</p> <p>9. This plant-herbivore interaction is highly resilient, and though some species (<i>Festuca rubra</i> and <i>Ranunculus acris</i>) declined in the <i>Holcus/Agrostis</i> grassland, there was no significant upward trend in the abundance of unpalatable plant species.</p> <p>10. Implications for future studies and analyses of plant-herbivore data. Concentrating on estimating primary productivity and herbivore offtake, rather than simply measuring change in plant biomass, is likely to provide greatly improved explanatory power for understanding herbivore population dynamics.</p>
Data from: Reproductive effort influences intra-seasonal variation in parasite-specific antibody responses in wild Soay sheep
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Data from: Survival costs of reproduction are mediated by parasite infection in wild Soay sheep
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Vegetation responses to Soay sheep grazing on St Kilda
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Data from: Linking genetic merit to sparse behavioral data: does behavior explain genetic variation for maternal care in Soay sheep?
Wild quantitative genetic studies have focused on a subset of traits (largely morphological and life-history), with others, such as behaviors, receiving much less attention. This is because it is challenging to obtain sufficient data, particularly for behaviors involving interactions between individuals. Here, we explore an indirect approach for pilot investigations of the role of genetic differences in generating variation in parental care. Variation in parental genetic effects for offspring performance is expected to arise from among-parent genetic variation in parental care. Therefore, we used the animal model to predict maternal breeding values for lamb growth and used these predictions to select females for field observation, where maternal and lamb behaviors were recorded. Higher predicted maternal breeding value for lamb growth was associated with greater suckling success, but not with any other measures of suckling behavior. Though our work cannot explicitly estimate the genetic basis of the specific traits involved, it does provide a strategy for hypothesis generation and refinement, that we hope could be used to justify data collection costs needed for confirmatory studies. Here results suggest that behavioral genetic variation is involved in generating maternal genetic effects on lamb growth in Soay sheep. Though important caveats and cautions apply, our approach may extend the ability to initiate more genetic investigations of difficult-to-study behaviours and social interactions in natural populations.
Data from: Female Soay sheep do not adjust their maternal care behaviour to the quality of their home range
Resource availability, through its impact on the costs and benefits of parental care, is expected to influence parental care behaviour. There has, to our knowledge, been no attempt to understand how variation in the resource use of wild individuals influences individual parental care behaviour. To understand how natural resource variability affects maternal care in female St. Kilda Soay sheep, we selected 69 females whose home ranges varied in quality (measured as the mean percentage cover of Holcus lanatus), and recorded the behaviour of each individual and her lamb over the period of maternal care. Home range quality did not influence suckling or non-suckling behaviours of the female or her lamb, suggesting that maternal care did not vary with a female's access to resources. Growth rate analyses confirmed the behavioural results, with no association between home range quality and the weight gain of lambs between birth and weaning. This work suggests that female Soay sheep faced with poorer resources do not favour their own future success over that of their lamb, and thereby do not exhibit a conservative reproductive strategy. This may be because when resource levels are high during the summer, females are able to offset the costs of lactation by consuming additional resources, regardless of the location of their home range. Our results suggest that more studies characterizing the environment experienced by individual animals will be necessary to fully understand how individuals alter their behaviour in response to temporal and spatial variation in the environment.
Data from: Conserved genetic architecture underlying recombination rate variation in a wild population of Soay sheep (Ovis aries)
Meiotic recombination breaks down linkage disequilibrium and forms new haplotypes, meaning that it is an important driver of diversity in eukaryotic genomes. Understanding the causes of variation in recombination rate is important in interpreting and predicting evolutionary phenomena and for understanding the potential of a population to respond to selection. However, despite attention in model systems, there remains little data on how recombination rate varies at the individual level in natural populations. Here, we used extensive pedigree and high-density SNP information in a wild population of Soay sheep (Ovis aries) to investigate the genetic architecture of individual autosomal recombination rate. Individual rates were high relative to other mammal systems, and were higher in males than in females (autosomal map lengths of 3748 cM and 2860 cM, respectively). The heritability of autosomal recombination rate was low but significant in both sexes (h2 = 0.16 & 0.12 in females and males, respectively). In females, 46.7% of the heritable variation was explained by a sub-telomeric region on chromosome 6; a genome-wide association study showed the strongest associations at the locus RNF212, with further associations observed at a nearby ~374kb region of complete linkage disequilibrium containing three additional candidate loci, CPLX1, GAK and PCGF3. A second region on chromosome 7 containing REC8 and RNF212B explained 26.2% of the heritable variation in recombination rate in both sexes. Comparative analyses with 40 other sheep breeds showed that haplotypes associated with recombination rates are both old and globally distributed. Both regions have been implicated in rate variation in mice, cattle and humans, suggesting a common genetic architecture of recombination rate variation in mammals.
Data from: Robust extraction of quantitative structural information from high-variance histological images of livers from necropsied Soay sheep
Quantitative information is essential to the empirical analysis of biological systems. In many such systems, spatial relations between anatomical structures is of interest, making imaging a valuable data acquisition tool. However, image data can be difficult to analyse quantitatively. Many image processing algorithms are highly sensitive to variations in the image, limiting their current application to fields where sample and image quality may be very high. Here, we develop robust image processing algorithms for extracting structural information from a dataset of high-variance histological images of inflamed liver tissue obtained during necropsies of wild Soay sheep. We demonstrate that features of the data can be measured in a fully automated manner, providing quantitative information which can be readily used in statistical analysis. We show that these methods provide measures that correlate well with a manual, expert operator-led analysis of the same images, that they provide advantages in terms of sampling a wider range of information and that information can be extracted far more quickly than in manual analysis.
Data from: Linking genetic merit to sparse behavioral data: does behavior explain genetic variation for maternal care in Soay sheep?
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Data from: Female Soay sheep do not adjust their maternal care behaviour to the quality of their home range
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Data from: Conserved genetic architecture underlying recombination rate variation in a wild population of Soay sheep (Ovis aries)
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Data from: Robust extraction of quantitative structural information from high-variance histological images of livers from necropsied Soay sheep
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Data from: Accounting for female space sharing in St. Kilda Soay sheep (Ovis aries) results in little change in heritability estimates
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