A joint team of scientists from Australia and Israel led by Kyle Ewart and Dr. Richard Major traced the invasion history of Common Mynas (Acridotheres tristis) in Australia over the past 150 years. We characterized the genetic landscape of this intricate invasion, where two primary introductions were made in Sydney and in Melbourne, and a third secondary introduction was probably made in the Gold Coast.
We used advanced genomic techniques (reduced genome representation method, DArTseq) to generate a high resolution profile of the Common Myna genome.
We found signals of genetic structuring reflecting historic introductions, suggesting that dispersal was limited by anthropogenic geography. This result was also supported by significant isolation-by-distance patterns found at each of the primary introduction points.
Our results suggest that management focus should be directed towards the invasion fronts, rather than the large, historic source populations.
Find the link to the paper here:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jbi.13473
Our future efforts are now directed at applying this methodology towards a comparative genomic approach where another invasive population (Israel) and a native population will be compared to these Australia populations. News to come.