ArticleBMC evolutionary biology2015
Variation at the DRD4 locus is associated with wariness and local site selection in urban black swans.
Article in BMC evolutionary biology, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers.
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed.
- Associations of genetic polymorphisms with boldness, stress response, and route efficiency in homing pigeons (Columba livia).Physiology & behavior · 2026Article
- Molecular characterization of chicken DA systems reveals that the avian personality gene,Frontiers in neuroanatomy · 2025Article
- Signatures of selection with cultural interference.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Birds of a feather flock together: a dataset for Clock and Adcyap1 genes from migration genetics studies.Scientific data · 2023Article
- The genomic response to urbanization in the damselflyEvolutionary applications · 2023Article
- Urbanization is associated with non-coding polymorphisms in candidate behavioural genes in the Eurasian coot.Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- DRD4 allele frequencies in greylag geese vary between urban and rural sites.Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Genome-wide parallelism underlies contemporary adaptation in urban lizards.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Molecular biology of serotonergic systems in avian brains.Frontiers in molecular neuroscience · 2023Review
- Are behaviour and stress-related phenotypes in urban birds adaptive?The Journal of animal ecology · 2022Article
- Article
- Epigenetics and the city: Non-parallel DNA methylation modifications across pairs of urban-forest Great tit populations.Evolutionary applications · 2022Article
- Detectability and impact of repetitive surveys on threatened West African crocodylians.Ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- Animal cognition in an urbanised world.Frontiers in ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- How human behavior can impact the evolution of genetically-mediated behavior in wild non-human species.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2020Review
- Contagious fear: Escape behavior increases with flock size in European gregarious birds.Ecology and evolution · 2019Article
- A roadmap for urban evolutionary ecology.Evolutionary applications · 2019Article
- Adaptation, speciation and extinction in the Anthropocene.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2018Review
- Evolution of genomic variation in the burrowing owl in response to recent colonization of urban areas.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2018Article
- Evolution of sex-specific pace-of-life syndromes: genetic architecture and physiological mechanisms.Behavioral ecology and sociobiology · 2018Review
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundInteractions between wildlife and humans are increasing. Urban animals are often less wary of humans than their non-urban counterparts, which could be explained by habituation, adaptation or local site selection. Under local site selection, individuals that are less tolerant of humans are less likely to settle in urban areas. However, there is little evidence for such temperament-based site selection, and even less is known about its underlying genetic basis. We tested whether site selection in urban and non-urban habitats by black swans (Cygnus atratus) was associated with polymorphisms in two genes linked to fear in animals, the dopamine receptor D4 (DRD4) and serotonin transporter (SERT) genes.
resultsWariness in swans was highly repeatable between disturbance events (repeatability = 0.61) and non-urban swans initiated escape from humans earlier than urban swans. We found no inter-individual variation in the SERT gene, but identified five DRD4 genotypes and an association between DRD4 genotype and wariness. Individuals possessing the most common DRD4 genotype were less wary than individuals possessing rarer genotypes. As predicted by the local site selection hypothesis, genotypes associated with wary behaviour were over three times more frequent at the non-urban site. This resulted in moderate population differentiation at DRD4 (FST = 0.080), despite the sites being separated by only 30 km, a short distance for this highly-mobile species. Low population differentiation at neutrally-selected microsatellite loci and the likely occasional migration of swans between the populations reduces the likelihood of local site adaptations.
conclusionOur results suggest that wariness in swans is partly genetically-determined and that wary swans settle in less-disturbed areas. More generally, our findings suggest that site-specific management strategies may be necessary that consider the temperament of local animals.
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