Mitochondrial DNA diversity and phylogeography of insular Newfoundland red foxes (<i>Vulpes vulpes deletrix</i>)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As the only native insular Newfoundland, Canada, canid from the extinction of the wolf in the 1930s to the recent arrival of coyotes, the red fox (Vulpes vulpes deletrix) poses interesting questions about genetic distinctiveness and the postglacial colonization history of the island's depauperate mammalian fauna. Here, we characterize genetic variability at the mitochondrial control region in 189 foxes from the island of Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, and Labrador. We identified 8 haplotypes (3 new to this study) defined by 11 polymorphic sites, with an average pairwise sequence divergence of ~0.003 and haplotypic diversity of 0.56 among localities. A pairwise distribution of control region sequence differences, rho estimate of divergence time, and tests of neutrality (Fu's F S and Tajima's D) are weakly consistent with a population expansion ~9,000 years ago, correlating with retreat of glacial ice from the region. Haplotype composition reflects primarily the Eastern subclade of Aubry and colleagues and supports Aubry's 2-refugia hypothesis that indigenous red foxes in North America are derived from disparate refugia isolated during the Wisconsinan glaciation. Haplotype identity and pattern of population differentiation suggest recolonization of the island of Newfoundland via a northern glacial refugium via Quebec or Labrador rather than an Atlantic or southern route, but provide no mitochondrial genetic evidence to support differentiation of this population of foxes along subspecies lines. We establish a baseline for continued investigations of population demography, genetic structure, and adaptive genetic diversity in island Newfoundland red foxes, a population of interest from both ecological and wildlife disease perspectives.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".