Genetic panmixia of black-faced spoonbills sampled in Taiwan and Hong Kong
Migratory birds with different wintering grounds might have fidelity to their own breeding grounds which could lead to genetic differentiation (Rubenstein et al., 2002). To test whether black-faced spoonbills wintering in Taiwan and Hong Kong originated from different genetic groups, we conducted a model-based admixture analysis (Alexander & Lange, 2011) based on 215,722 unlinked (r 2< 0.2) genome-wide autosomal SNPs (coverage > 10×). The results of the admixture analysis (Fig. 1B) and principal components analysis (Fig. 1C) suggest that all black-faced spoonbill individuals sampled in the current study likely consisted of a single breeding population, allowing us to combine the genomic data from the individuals from the two wintering sites for the subsequent analyses. Our results are consistent with satellite tracking records which showed black-faced spoonbills tagged in both Taiwan and Hong Kong returning to the Demilitarized Zone of Korea in the breeding season (Ueta et al., 2002).