Scientific publications

Despite the fact that Wood Warblers form a permanent pair during the breeding season, some males remain unpaired and continue to move around the territory. It has been suggested that the large number of unpaired males participate in extrapair copulation. Studies aimed to detect extrapair young in this species demonstrate that the proportion of such offspring in the total number of examined individuals varies significantly, from 0 to 30.7 %. Since there are no universal markers suitable for paternity analysis in Wood Warbler, researchers use a different set of loci in each study. In different populations, the polymorphism of the same loci can vary significantly, so the goal of this study was to determine markers that can be used to search for extrapair offspring in the northeast of the Wood Warbler’s breeding range. For our purposes, we selected ten microsatellite loci that were used in previous studies. One of the loci (Cam-6) was excluded from the analysis because no amplification products were detected. The Ase-27 locus showed low allelic diversity per locus and was also excluded. Eight out of ten loci – Cam-2, Cam-3, Cam-23, Cam-24, Ase-5, Ase-18, Pca-3, Fhu-2 – showed high polymorphism. The number of alleles per locus ranged from 5 to 9 (n = 5–8 individuals). Expected heterozygosity varied from 0.742 to 0.883. No null alleles were observed. Thus, we conclude that eight of the selected markers are suitable for studying the family structure of Wood Warblers in the northeast of the species range.