BioProject

Free-breeding dogs have occupied the Galápagos islands at least since the 1830s, however, it was not until the 1900s that dog populations grew substantially, endangering wildlife and spreading disease. More...

Free-breeding dogs have occupied the Galápagos islands at least since the 1830s, however, it was not until the 1900s that dog populations grew substantially, endangering wildlife and spreading disease. In 1981, authorities sanctioned the culling of free-roaming dogs. Yet there are currently large free-roaming dog populations of unknown ancestry on the islands of Isabela and Santa Cruz, whose ancestry has never been assessed on a genome-wide scale. Thus, we performed a complete genomic analysis of the current Galápagos dog population as well as historical Galápagos dogs sampled between 1969 and 2003, testing for population structure, admixture, and shared ancestry. Our dataset included samples from 187 modern and six historical Galápagos dogs, together with whole genome sequence from over 2,000 modern purebred and village dogs. Our results indicate that modern Galápagos dogs are recently admixed with purebred dogs but show no evidence of a population bottleneck related to the culling. Additionally, IBD analyses reveal evidence of shared shepherd-dog ancestry in the historical Galápagos dogs. Overall, our results demonstrate that the 1980s culling of dogs was ineffective in controlling population size and did little to reduce genetic diversity, instead producing a stable and expanding population with genomic signatures of historical dogs remaining today. The insights from this study can be used to improve population control strategies for the Galápagos Islands and other endangered endemic communities worldwide. Overall design: 187 samples of free-roaming dogs collected from Santa Cruz and Isabela Islands in the Galápagos Less...