Molecular tracking and prevalence of the red colour morph restricted to a harvested leopard population in South Africa

The red leopard (Panthera pardus) colour morph is a colour variant that
occurs only in South Africa, where it is confined to the Central Bushveld
bioregion. Red leopards have been spreading over the past 40 years, which
raises the speculation that the prevalence of this phenotype is related to
low dispersal of young individuals owing to high off-take in the region.
Intensive selective hunting tends to remove large resident males from the
breeding population, which gives young males the chance to mate with
resident females that are more likely to be their relatives, eventually
increasing the frequency of rare genetic variants. To investigate the
genetic mechanisms underlying the red coat colour morph in leopards, and
whether its prevalence in South Africa relates to an increase in genetic
relatedness in the population, we sequenced exons of six colour coat
associated genes and 20 microsatellite loci in twenty wild-type and four
red leopards. The results were combined with demographic data available
from our study sites. We found that red leopards own a haplotype in
homozygosity identified by one non-synonymous SNP and a 1 bp deletion that
causes a frameshift in the Tyrosinase Related Protein 1 (TYRP1), a gene
known to be involved in the biosynthesis of melanin. Microsatellite
analyses indicate clear signs of a population bottleneck and a relatedness
of 0.11 among all pairwise relationships, eventually supporting our
hypothesis that a rare colour morph in the wild has increased its local
frequency due to low natal dispersal. This was backed by a high
human-induced mortality rate (40%).