Standardizing microsatellite panels for individual identification of seabirds’ Snow Petrel Pagodroma nivea and Wilson’s Storm Petrel Oceanites oceanicus in Antarctica

Abstract

Seabirds are known to be important indicators of marine ecosystems health. Procellariiformes are one of the most abundant seabird species distributed from warm tropical to cold temperate regions including Antarctica. With few long-term studies on breeding seabirds at the Antarctic continent, crucial biological parameters such as genetic variation, population genetic structure and past population demography is lacking for most of the commonly occurring species. Under the Biology and Environmental Sciences component of the Indian Antarctic programme, long-term monitoring of Antarctic biodiversity is being conducted. In this paper, we describe a panel of 12 and 10 cross-species microsatellite markers for two relatively less studied seabird species in Antarctica, snow petrel Pagodroma nivea and Wilsons storm petrel Oceanites oceanicus, respectively. These loci showed high amplification success and moderate level of polymorphism in snow petrel (mean no. of alleles 7.08{+/-}3.01 and mean observed heterozygosity 0.35{+/-}0.23), but low polymorphism in Wilsons storm petrel (mean no. of alleles 3.9{+/-}1.3 and mean observed heterozygosity 0.28{+/-}0.18). The results demonstrate that these panels can unambiguously identify individuals of both species from various types of biological materials. This work forms a baseline for undertaking long-term genetic research of Antarctic seabird species and provides critical insights into their population genetics.