Abstract
Climate variation is an important factor shaping the demographic histories of many marine species, though impacts likely differ depending on species life
history, habitat preferences and ecology. Investigating how species responded to historic climate fluctuations may
provide critical insights into a species’ response to current climate change. Despite their ecological diversity, shark
species share many similar life history characteristics and may be especially vulnerable to anthropogenic and climate
impacts. We compared patterns of genetic variability, mismatch distributions and demographic reconstructions from coalescence approaches among temperate and tropi-
cal shark species with differing ecological characteristics, to investigate the effect of the past glaciation cycles on
population abundance. Genetic diversity at two mitochondrial DNA regions (ND2 and control region) was assayed
in four North Pacific species, Pacific spiny dogfish, Pacific sleeper sharks, salmon shark, and bluntnose sixgill shark.
In addition, control region sequences acquired from GenBank for five shark species tope shark (California/
Australia), white shark (California), blacktip shark (eastern and western Gulf of Mexico), lemon shark (Bahamas), and
whale shark were analyzed. General patterns in genetic diversity, mismatch analyses and Bayesian skyline plots
supported our hypothesis that species biology affected the impact of climate variation on demographic history. Consequently, our results suggest that effects of contemporary climate change on sharks may be to some degree predict- able from species biology, distribution, habitat and the impact of past climate events.
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