Abstract
Cytochrome b sequences from South American specimens of the water opossum Chironectes minimus exhibit uncorrected pairwise differences of 0.6% or less among samples collected thousands of kilometers apart (in Guyana, Bolivia and southeastern Brazil). Despite published evidence of population divergence from recent analyses of craniodental morphology, our results suggest extensive gene flow or recent range expansion across the South American landscapes currently occupied by this seldom-collected species.
Acknowledgments
We thank the curators of tissue collections at the FMNH and ROM for making materials available for this project, and we acknowledge the stewardship of the Museum of Southwestern Biology (MSB, in Albuquerque) where tissues from the 1992 AMNH/MSB expedition to Bolivia are stored. Tissues of UFMG 2539 are stored at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (Berkeley), which were kindly provided to us. We acknowledge Lorissa Fujishin’s careful lab work for this project, which was partially supported by National Science Foundation grants to Voss (DEB-0743039) and Jansa (DEB-0743062).
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