Demographic inference in barn swallows using whole‐genome data shows signal for bottleneck and subspecies differentiation during the Holocene

Abstract

Accounting for historical demographic features is vital for many types of evolutionary inferences, including the estimation of divergence times between closely related populations. In barn swallow, Hirundo rustica , inferring historical population sizes and subspecies divergence times can shed light on the recent co‐evolution of this species with humans. Pairwise sequentially Markovian coalescent uncovered population growth beginning on the order of one million years ago—which may reflect the radiation of the broader Hirundo genus—and a more recent population decline. Additionally, we used approximate Bayesian computation to evaluate hypotheses about recent timescale barn swallow demography, including population growth due to human commensalism, and a potential founder event associated with the onset of nesting on human structures. We found signal for a bottleneck event approximately 7,700 years ago, near the time that humans began building substantial structures, although there was considerable uncertainty associated with this estimate. Subspecies differentiation and subsequent growth occurred after the bottleneck in the best‐supported model, an order of magnitude more recently than previous estimates in this system. We also compared results obtained from whole‐genome sequencing versus reduced representation sequencing, finding many similar results despite substantial allelic dropout in the reduced representation data, which may have affected estimates of some parameters. This study presents the first genetic evidence of a potential barn swallow founder effect and subspecies divergence coinciding with the Holocene, which is an important step in analysing the biogeographical history of a well‐known human commensal species.

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