Abstract
Asiatic wild dog (Cuon alpinus) or dhole is an endangered canid with fragmented distribution in South, East and Southeast Asia. The remaining populations of this species face severe conservation challenges from anthropogenic interventions, but only limited information is available at population and demography levels. Here, we describe the novel molecular approaches for unambiguous species and sex identification from noninvasively collected dhole samples. We successfully tested these assays on 130 field-collected dhole faecal samples from the Vidarbha part of central Indian tiger landscape that resulted in 97 and 77% success rates in species and sex identification, respectively. These accurate, fast and cheap molecular approaches prove the efficacy of such methods in gathering ecological data from this elusive, endangered canid and show their application in generating population level information from noninvasive samples.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Dean, Faculty of Wildlife Sciences and Director, WII for their support. We thank Maharashtra Forest Department for necessary permits and all forest department officials for logistic help in the field. We thank the anonymous reviewer for constructive comments on our earlier version of the manuscript. Funding from Maharashtra Forest Department and National Tiger Conservation Authority, Government of India supported this work. Indranil Mondal provided cartographic inputs. CSIR supported S. Modi and the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India’s INSPIRE Faculty Award supported SM.
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Shrushti Modi and Samrat Mondol contributed equally to this work.
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Modi, S., Mondol, S., Ghaskadbi, P. et al. Noninvasive DNA-based species and sex identification of Asiatic wild dog (\({\varvec{Cuon~alpinus}}\)). J Genet 97, 1457–1461 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12041-018-1017-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12041-018-1017-6