Recent demographic bottlenecks are not accompanied by a genetic signature in banner-tailed kangaroo rats

Single-sample methods of bottleneck detection are now routine analyses in studies of wild populations and conservation genetics. Three common approaches to bottleneck detection are the heterozygosity excess, mode-shift, and Mratio tests. Empirical groundtruthing of these methods is difficult, but their performances are critical for the accurate reconstruction of population demography. We use two banner-tailed kangaroo rat ( Dipodomys spectabilis ) populations from southeastern Arizona (USA) that are known to have experienced recent demographic reductions to search for genetic bottleneck signals with eight microsatellite loci. Over eight total sample-years, neither population showed a genetic bottleneck signature. M -ratios in both populations were large, stable, and never fell below a critical significance value ( M c ). The mode shift test did not detect any distortion of allele frequencies, and tests of heterozygosity excess were not significant in postbottleneck samples when we used standard microsatellite mutation models. The genetic effects of bottlenecks like those experienced by our study populations should be strongly influenced by rates of mutation and migration. We used genetic parentage data to estimate a relatively high mutation rate in D. spectabilis (0.0081 mutants/generation/locus), but mutation alone is unlikely to explain the temporal distribution of rare alleles that we observed. Migration (gene flow) is a more likely explanation, despite prior mark–recapture analysis that estimated very low rates of interpopulation dispersal. We interpret our kangaroo rat data in light of the broader literature and conclude that in natural populations connected by dispersal, demographic bottlenecks may prove difficult to detect using molecular genetic data.