Phylogeography of three closely related African bovids (tribe Alcelaphini)

The phylogeography of three species of African bovids, the hartebeest (Alcelaphus buselaphus), the topi (Damaliscus lunatus), and the wildebeest (Connochaetes taurinus), is inferred from sequence variation of 345 sequences at the control region (d-loop) of the mtDNA. The three species are closely related (tribe Alcelaphini) and share similar habitat requirements. Moreover, their former distribution extended over Africa, as a probable result of the expansion of open grassland on the continent during the last 2.5 Myr. A combination of population genetics (diversity and structure) and intraspecific phylogeny (tree topology and relative branch length) methods is used to substantiate scenarios of the species history. Population dynamics are inferred from the distribution of sequence pairwise differences within populations. In the three species, there is a significant structuring of the populations, as shown by analysis of molecular variance (AMOVA) pairwise and hierarchical differentiation estimations. In the wildebeest, a pattern of colonization from southern Africa toward east Africa is consistent with the asymmetric topology of the gene tree, showing a paraphyletic position of southern lineages, as well as their relatively longer branch lengths, and is supported by a progressive decline in population nucleotide diversity toward east Africa. The phylogenetic pattern found in the topi and the hartebeest differs from that of the wildebeest: lineages split into monophyletic clades, and no geographical trend is detected in population diversity. We suggest a scenario where these antelopes, previously with wide pan-African distributions, became extinct except in a few refugia. The hartebeest, and probably also the topi, survived in refugia north of the equator, in the east and the west, respectively, as well as one in the south. The southern refugium furthermore seems to have been the only place where the wildebeest has survived.