ИСТИНА

The study of population structure in seabirds could clarify the information about migration paths, dispersal of young, isolation between colonies etc. Here we conducted a population analysis of the Crested Auklet (CA), a small auk with bright plumage ornamentation and complex social behavior that breed in the north Pacific. Outside the breeding season, auklets spend time at the sea, and nothing is known about fidelity to the native colony of young as well as about isolation between different colonies. We tested morphometric, acoustic and genetic variability of birds from different colonies. We measured body weight, size and main ornamental traits (totally 509 CA from five sites). We analysed two main call types, the Bark (50 calls per site, totally 200 calls from four sites, 4 temporal-frequency variables measured) and the Trumpet call of CA (25 calls per site, totally 100 calls from four sites, 20 temporal-frequency variables measured). Finally, we analysed intra- and inter-population variability of the control region fragment (408 b.p.) of mitochondrial DNA (totally 128 samples from five sites) and of four microsatellite loci (totally 183 samples from five sites). One-way ANOVA with post-hoc Tukey test shows a negligible effect of “population” on morphometric traits (p>0.05 for most of comparisons). We also found a small effect of “site” on temporal-frequency variables of the Bark (p<0.001) and no significant effect on those of the Trumpet call (p>0.05). Besides, no genetic differentiation was found neither within one colony nor between colonies (p>0.05 for all FST and RST). A high haplotypic (H=0.994+/-0.002) and relatively low nucleotide diversity (0.013+/-0.007) were noted for all sites. All analyses show a high level of similarity between CA from different colonies, so we suppose that birds from different colonies could spend winters in mixed flocks, and the gene flow between colonies could be very intense.