AN INTEGRATIVE ANALYSIS OF GENETIC DIFFERENTIATION IN THE BROWN HARE LEPUS-EUROPAEUS BASED ON MORPHOLOGY, ALLOZYMES, AND MITOCHONDRIAL-DNA

A total of 469 brown hares Lepus europaeus Pallas, 1778 from 20 sampli ng sites in Austria were examined for genetic diversity within and amo ng populations by means of horizontal starch gel electrophoresis. Four teen out of 54 presumptive structural loci were polymorphic, one of wh ich was excluded from further population genetic analyses due to the o ccurrence of a null-allele. The mean proportion of polymorphic loci (P ) was 15.3% (SD 2.2%), and mean expected average heterozygosity (H-e) was 4.6% (SD 0.5%). Both relative (F-ST = 5.4%) and absolute (mean Nei 's 1978 D = 0.0016, SD 0.0016) genetic differentiation among populatio ns were low, suggesting a generally high level of migration. Cluster a nalysis revealed some separation of brown hare populations in western and northern Austria from those in the east and in the south. In 131 i ndividuals, mtDNA was digested with a battery of 16 restriction endonu cleases. Besides the standard type I which occurred exclusively in mos t of the populations, five additional haplotypes, each of them deviati ng from type I by one base pair substitution, were detected. Together with rare alleles at allozyme loci, the distribution of variant haplot ypes corroborated the spatial pattern obtained by allozyme distances a nd suggested considerable immigration of brown hares from the adjacent countries in the east and south. Twenty non-metric skull traits were scored in 443 individuals. Character variants were dichotomized (0/1) and the respective frequencies were used to calculate C. A. B. Smith's 'mean measure of divergence' (MMD) among five population groups. Morp hological differentiation was in accordance with the major population genetic pattern as revealed by molecular techniques. MtDNA variation ( nucleon diversity, nucleotide diversity) and morphological variation ( mean of SD in single characters) within populations were not significa ntly associated with one another, and did not show a relationship with indices of genetic variation obtained by allozyme analysis. These fin dings suggest that variability in only one of these characters cannot be considered representative for overall gene pool diversity-within po pulations.