Asiatic Lion Reintroduction Project

[tigerluver]

Interesting conclusions I see:
- There's a genetic distance and geographic distance correlation. Albeit, the significance of this correlation is null once Asiatic lions are removed from the group, indicating that Asiatic lions are relatively strong in terms of genetic distance. 
- The statistical tests is that the math is rejecting the genetic equality of lions across Africa, thus some type of genetic isolation has occured with it the history of the African populations. The author does not go all the way to state there is subspeciation within the African lion, but points out that there is diversity between regional populations which must be preserved by focusing on conserving lions area by area rather than looking at the total. 
- The 95% CI and then range following means that the author is 95% mathematically confident that the species age is somewhere in that range. Looking at the estimates, the modern lion is quite old. 
- Asiatic lions are unique for H7 and H8 haplotypes compared to the African populations. The closest African populations to Asia's are the Eastern specimens. Geographically, that makes sense.

Let's focus on this right here:

*This image is copyright of its original author

In all of the classes except 12S/16S, the Asiatic lion shared sequences with the rest of the African population. The major difference that the Asiatic lion shows in these three classes is the lack of variation. Lack of variation and inbreeding go hand in hand, so this can be taken as proof of inbreeding.

Now on the 12S/16S class. The Asiatic lion was completed unique here, so I began to think clear subspeciation due to geographic isolation. But there're a few caveats, look at the Kenya population, completely unique in the 12S/16S class as well, while being a next door neighbors to the other east African groups, Ser I-III, NGC, and UGA who all are essentially identical in the 12S/16S class. The south African groups all have significant difference in the 12S/16S class as well even though those groups are in close proximity to one another.

My conclusion, the 12S/16S class seems too sensitive to geographic isolation and maybe just too intrinisically volatile of a sequence to be a grounds for subspeciation. Populations in essentially the same area only separated by legal lines are showing significant variablity in this class, and therefore it would be more logical to state that the Asiatic lion's uniqueness in 12S/16S is not a subspeciating factor. 

Off this study alone, the African population is diverse in the range as one species, but not so diverse that we can subspeciate regional populations. The Asiatic lion shows symptoms of a genetic bottleneck, but what genes it has are for the most part shared with the African populations. Therefore, genetic data here fails to subspeciate the Asiatic lion from the African population, the populations are funtionally equal. 

Failing to subspeciate does not mean that the lion did not naturally migrate into west Asia, and rather the author accepts such a migration. It's just that lion's seem to be genetically set, and the genomes are not sensitive to changes casued by region.

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