Little allozyme and mtDNA variability in brown hares (Lepus europaeus) from New Zealand and Britain - A legacy of bottlenecks?

We studied cross nuclear and mitochondrial gene pools of brown hares (Lepus europaeus) from three Local populations in Britain and two in New Zealand, to test the hypothesis of reduced genetic variability in hares from New Ze aland resulting from few founders originating from Britain. Multilocus allo zyme electrophoresis of 52 protein Loci and analysis of restriction fragmen t length polymorphisms of total mitochondrial DNA based on 16 hexanucleotid -cleaving restriction enzymes were employed in 119 and 36 hares, respective ly. Observed and expected average heterozygosities, rates of polymorphism, average numbers of alleles per Locus, Shannon-Weaver information indices of allelic diversity, as well as values of haplotype and nucleotide diversity were similar in all regional samples. But hares from both New Zealand and Britain had significantly lower genetic diversity than brown hares from con tinental Europe studied earlier. Thus, gene pool erosion Likely occurred al ready in British hares, perhaps associated with their probable introduction in Roman times. Theoretically, the small number of alleles found in Britis h brown hares could have been sampled by the few hares that were reported a s having constituted the founder stock in New Zealand in the nineteenth cen tury. As expected, rare alleles of British brown hares were absent in New Z ealand, But drift had only a slight effect on the gene pool composition of hares in New Zealand.