![]() ![]() ![]() “It’s taken a little more seriously,” he says, “because it requires a bit more rigorous evidence to document that it’s a species and not just a subspecies or a variation on a more widely spread species.” ![]() Protection of a species, says Ferguson, is often considered more important “because of the evolutionary distinctiveness.” Previously designated a subspecies, it has suffered dramatic declines in its population over the last century.Įxperts petitioned for it to be included in the Endangered Species Act while it was a subspecies, but it has yet to be added to the list. ![]() The Plains spotted skunk already knows this struggle. Knowing each individual species’ habitat range and barriers, diet and reproductive capabilities will prepare scientists to protect them if, in the future, one of the populations declines. “One of the things I hope will happen is that this will encourage people to look at the ecology of the species in their own backyard,” says Ferguson. Understanding the similarities between these newly identified species could help open doors for more research into spotted skunks in other regions. Up until now, most research has focused on spotted skunks in the western and eastern U.S. “The person who collected a skunk 40 years ago had no idea it would be used in a paper today.”īut what surprised the scientists most was how much the two species have in common.ĭespite being geographically distant, the researchers found that the Yucatan spotted skunk is more closely related to species living in the eastern U.S., like the Plains spotted skunk, than it is to other species living in closer proximity to it, like those in Tabasco, Mexico. “That’s the beauty of museums,” says Ferguson. The team also used museum specimens to determine that the Plains spotted skunk, which calls the Great Plains its home, is its own species, and not a subspecies as previously thought. Century-old museum samples led Molly McDonough, a biology professor at Chicago State University and another of the paper’s coauthors, to identify the Yucatan spotted skunk, a previously unrecognized species endemic to the Yucatan Peninsula. So they turned to museum collections to fill those holes. Without any tissue samples from Central America or the Yucatan, he and his team couldn’t look at the full history of the spotted skunk’s evolution, a crucial component to understanding the species that exist today. Some specimens would come to him after they were killed in wildlife-vehicle collisions across the United States, but he still needed more. It would take years to amass enough specimens-Ferguson started collecting them while he was still working on his master’s degree, which he completed in 2008. But collecting enough specimens to carry out a complete DNA study on the wide-ranging genus, which can be found throughout North and Central America, was no easy task. The lack of genetic data that was analyzed among the species made Ferguson want to look more closely at spotted skunk diversity. But those factors are so similar among some of the seven species that they were thought to be the same type of spotted skunk. Prior to the new study, researchers tended to differentiate spotted skunk species by looking at their morphology-things like differences in spotting patterns, as well as cranial and dental measurements. “We expected to either validate the four species hypothesis or invalidate it and make it three, not actually expand it to seven,” says Adam Ferguson, an evolutionary ecologist at Chicago’s Field Museum and one of the paper’s coauthors. In a new paper in Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, a team of researchers describes how it analyzed the DNA of 203 skunk specimens-some victims of wildlife-vehicle collisions and others from museum collections-to determine what should be considered a species and what should be a subspecies. Most recently, they agreed there were four.īut now, a group of scientists have made a remarkable new discovery: seven species of spotted skunk exist. Over the years, researchers have thought as many as 14 and as few as two existed. Without a wide range of specimens to study, scientists haven’t been able to conduct genetic analysis to determine how many species exist. It’s an exaggerated version of a defense mechanism they share with their much larger striped cousins, and one that makes them tricky to catch and, as a result, to study.Īnd not being able to catch them has created a problem. Weighing in at less than two pounds, they plant their front paws firmly on the ground, throw their hind legs into the air and let their tail splay out like garland on a Christmas tree, balancing in a handstand as a final warning before they spray. ![]()
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