Missing the Forest for the Gene Trees: Conservation Genetics is More than the Identification of Distinct Population Segments

Laporte and Charlesworth (2002) also illustrated that when males have higher variance in reproductive success and a lower dispersal rate than females, there is a sharp decrease in the difference in population structure expected between mtDNA and nDNA. Because males are more philopatric than females (Grzybowski 1995) and extrapair copulations are common in songbirds, this scenario is quite likely in Black-capped Vireos. [...] we reported that "once distances separating pairs of populations exceed 100 km, there appears to be little evidence that genetic differentiation increases with greater distances" (Barr et al. 2008:3635).