Etikettarkiv: feralisation

Kauai field trip 2018

Publicerat i dear diary, english av

Let’s keep the tradition of delayed travel posts going!

In August last year, I joined Dom Wright, Rie Henriksen, and Robin Abbey-Lee, as part of Dom’s FERALGEN project, on their field work on Kauai. I did some of my dissertation work on the Kauai feral chickens, but I never saw them live until now. Our collaborator Eben Gering was also on the islands, but the closest we got to each other was Skyping between the islands. It all went smoothly until the end of the trip, when a hurricane came uncomfortably close to the island for a while. Here are some pictures. In time, I promise to blog about the actual research too.

Look! Chickens by the sea, chickens on parking lots, a sign telling people not to feed the chickens on a sidewalk in central Kapaa! Lots of chickens.

I’m not kidding: lots of chickens.

Links

An old Nature News feature from a previous field trip (without me)

My post about our 2016 paper on Kauai feralisation genomics

Paper: ”Feralisation targets different genomic loci to domestication in the chicken”

Publicerat i english, evolution, genetik av

It is out: Feralisation targets different genomic loci to domestication in the chicken. This is the second of our papers on the Kauai feral and admixed chicken population, and came out a few days ago.

The Kauai chicken population is kind of famous: you can find them for instance on Flickr, or on YouTube. We’ve previously looked at their plumage, listened to the roosters’ crowings, and sequenced mitochondrial DNA to investigate their origins. Based on this, we concur with the common view that the chickens of Kauai probably are a mixture of feral birds of domestic origin and wild Junglefowl. The Kauai chickens look and sound like a mix of wild and domestic, and we found mitochondrial DNA of two haplogroups, one of which (called D) is typical in ancient chicken DNA from Pacific islands (Gering et al 2015).

In this paper, we looked at the rest of the genome of the same chickens — you didn’t think we sequenced the whole thing just to look at the mitochondrion plus a subset of markers, did you? We turn to population genomics, and a family of methods called selective sweep mapping, to search for regions of their genome that show signs of being affected by natural selection. This lets us: 1) draw pretty rainbow plots such as  this one …

kauai2_fig1a

(Figure 1a from the paper in question, Johnsson & al 2016. cc:by The chromosomes have been laid out on the horizontal axis with different colours, and split into windows of 40 kb. Each dot represents the heterozygosity of that windows. For all the details, see the paper.)

… 2) highlight a regions of the genome that may have been selected during feralisation on Kauai (these are the icicles in the graph, highligthed by arrows); 3) conclude that the regions that look like they’ve been selected in feralisation overlap very little with the ones that look like they’ve been selected in chicken domestication. Hence the title.

That was the main result, but of course we also look at what genes are highlighted. Mostly we have no idea how they may contribute to feralisation, but a couple of regions overlap with those that we’ve previously found in genetic mapping of comb size and egg laying in our wild-by-domestic intercross. We also compare the potentially selected regions to domestic chicken sequences.

Last year, Ewen Callaway visited Dominic Wright, Eben Gering and Rie Henriksen on the last fieldtrip to Kauai. The article, When chickens go wild, was published in Nature News in January, and it explains a lot of the ideas nicely. This paper was submitted by then, so the samples they gathered on that trip do not feature in it. But, spoiler alert: there is more to come. (I don’t know what role I personally will play, but that is less important.)

As you may have guessed if you looked at the author list, this was a collaboration between quite a lot of people in Linköping, Michigan, London, and Victoria. Thanks to all involved! This was great fun, and for those of you who like this sort of thing, I hope the paper will be an interesting read.

Literature

M. Johnsson, E. Gering, P. Willis, S. Lopez, L. Van Dorp, G. Hellenthal, R. Henriksen, U. Friberg & D. Wright. (2016) Feralisation targets different genomic loci to domestication in the chicken. Nature Communications. doi:10.1038/ncomms12950

Paper: ”Mixed ancestry and admixture in Kauai’s feral chickens: invasion of domestic genes into ancient Red Junglefowl reservoirs”

Publicerat i english, genetik av

We have a new paper almost out (now in early view) in Molecular Ecology about the chickens on the Pacific island Kauai. These chickens are pretty famous for being everywhere on the island. Where do they come from? If you use your favourite search engine you’ll find an explanation with two possible origins: ancient wild birds brought over by the Polynesians and escaped domestic chickens. This post on Kauaiblog is great:

Hawaii’s official State bird is the Hawaiian Goose, or Nene, but on Kauai, everyone jokes that the “official” birds of the Garden Island are feral chickens, especially the wild roosters.

Wikepedia says the “mua” or red jungle fowl were brought to Kauai by the Polynesians as a source of food, thriving on an island where they have no real predators. /…/
Most locals agree that wild chickens proliferated after Hurricane Iniki ripped across Kauai in 1992, destroying chicken coops and releasing domesticated hens, and well as roosters being bred for cockfighting. Now these brilliantly feathered fowl inhabit every part of this tropical paradise, crowing at all hours of the day and night to the delight or dismay of tourists and locals alike.

In this paper, we look at phenotypes and genetics and find that this dual origin explanation is probably true.

jeff_trimble_kauai_chickens_cc_by_nc_sa

(Chickens on Kauai. This is not from our paper, but by Jeff Trimble (cc:by-sa-nc) published on Flickr. There are so many pretty chicken pictures there!)

Dom, Eben, and Pamela went to Kauai to photograph, record to and collect DNA from the chickens. (I stayed at home and did sequence bioinformatics.) The Kauai chickens look and sound like mixture of wild and domestic chickens. Some of them have the typical Junglefowl plumage, and other have flecks of white. Their crows vary in the length of the characteristic fourth syllable. Also, some of them have yellow legs, a trait that domestic chickens seem to have gotten not from the Red but from the Grey Junglefowl.

We looked at DNA sequences by massively parallel (SOLiD) sequencing of 23 individuals. We find mitochondrial sequences that fall in two haplogroups: E and D. The presence of the D haplogroup, which is the dominating one in ancient DNA sequences from the Pacific, means that there is a Pacific component to their ancestry. The E group, on the other hand, occurs in domestic chickens. It also shows up in some ancient DNA samples from the Pacific, but not from Kauai (and there is a scientific debate about these sequences). The nuclear genome analysis is pretty inconclusive. I think what we would need is some samples of possible domestic source populations (Where did the escapee  chickens came from? Are there other traditional domestic sources?) and a better sampling of Red Junglefowl to make better sense of it.

When we take the plumage, vocalisation and mitochondrial DNA together, it looks like this is a feral admixed population of either Red Junglefowl or traditional Pacific chickens mixed with domestics. A very interesting population indeed.

Kenneth Chang wrote about the paper in New York Times; includes quotes from Eben and Dom.

E Gering, M Johnsson, P Willis, T Getty, D Wright (2015) Mixed ancestry and admixture in Kauai’s feral chickens: invasion of domestic genes into ancient Red Junglefowl reservoirs. Molecular ecology