Data from: Demographic history of a recent invasion of house mice on the isolated Island of Gough

Island populations provide natural laboratories for studying key
contributors to evolutionary change, including natural selection,
population size, and the colonization of new environments. The demographic
histories of island populations can be reconstructed from patterns of
genetic diversity. House mice (Mus musculus) inhabit islands throughout
the globe, making them an attractive system for studying island
colonization from a genetic perspective. Gough Island, in the central
South Atlantic Ocean, is one of the remotest islands in the world. House
mice were introduced to Gough Island by sealers during the 19th century,
and display unusual phenotypes, including exceptionally large body size
and carnivorous feeding behavior. We describe genetic variation in Gough
Island mice using mitochondrial sequences, nuclear sequences, and
microsatellites. Phylogenetic analysis of mitochondrial sequences
suggested that Gough Island mice belong to Mus musculus domesticus, with
the maternal lineage possibly originating in England or France. Cluster
analyses of microsatellites revealed genetic membership for Gough Island
mice in multiple coastal populations in Western Europe, suggesting admixed
ancestry. Gough Island mice showed substantial reductions in mitochondrial
and nuclear sequence variation and weak reductions in microsatellite
diversity compared with Western European populations, consistent with a
population bottleneck. Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) estimated
that mice recently colonized Gough Island (~100 years ago) and experienced
a 98% reduction in population size followed by a rapid expansion. Our
results indicate that the unusual phenotypes of Gough Island mice evolved
rapidly, positioning these mice as useful models for understanding rapid
phenotypic evolution.