Top Highlights

• New Zealand and Tasmania. In both locations, rabbits were commonly traded during the early 1800s
• The population bottlenecks that accompanied these introductions have resulted in a 10.6% reduction of genetic diversity from continental Europe (France) to Britain and 12.3% from Britain to mainland Australia (Fig. 2A and SI Appendix, Table S2)
• highest number of low-frequency alleles was in France, followed by Britain and then mainland Australia
• Tajima’s D statistic—a summary of the allele frequency spectrum—which becomes progressively larger from France to Britain and then Australia (SI Appendix, Table S2).
• Two smaller clusters were found in a far smaller geographic region—one group of four rabbits was from Sydney and the other was a single rabbit from Cattai National Park, which lies northwest of Sydney. To corroborate this result, we used a neighbor-joining tree to cluster rabbits by their genetic similarity (SI Appendix, Fig. S1). Again, the rabbit...

Domain