Publications by authors named "John A Totterdell"
Article Synopsis
- Cooperative hunting between humans and killer whales in Eden, Australia, was documented for nearly a century until local whaling ceased in 1928, leading to diminished sightings.
- DNA from a famous killer whale, "Old Tom," was sequenced and compared with global killer whale populations, revealing he shared a common ancestor with various groups but had unique genetic traits.
- The study highlights the importance of Indigenous knowledge in understanding the historical relationship between humans and killer whales, suggesting that the local population may have gone extinct with no identified descendants.
Runs of homozygosity (ROH) occur when offspring inherit haplotypes that are identical by descent from each parent. Length distributions of ROH are informative about population history; specifically, the probability of inbreeding mediated by mating system and/or population demography. Here, we investigated whether variation in killer whale (Orcinus orca) demographic history is reflected in genome-wide heterozygosity and ROH length distributions, using a global data set of 26 genomes representative of geographic and ecotypic variation in this species, and two F1 admixed individuals with Pacific-Atlantic parentage.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFReconstruction of the demographic and evolutionary history of populations assuming a consensus tree-like relationship can mask more complex scenarios, which are prevalent in nature. An emerging genomic toolset, which has been most comprehensively harnessed in the reconstruction of human evolutionary history, enables molecular ecologists to elucidate complex population histories. Killer whales have limited extrinsic barriers to dispersal and have radiated globally, and are therefore a good candidate model for the application of such tools.
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