Many species of whales went through recent bottlenecks due to commercial whaling. These declines were rapid and recent relative to the life spans and generation times of these species, raising questions regarding to what degree commercial whaling influenced the genetic characteristics of these populations. We analyzed mitochondrial and nuclear DNA from pre‐ and postwhaling samples from two populations that have arguably shown the greatest degree of recovery: eastern North Pacific gray and humpback whales. We also compare the performance of different methods to test for historic bottlenecks and infer past demography based on genetic data. We found substantially higher levels of genetic diversity in gray than in humpback whales (for both time periods), likely due to recent connectivity between Atlantic and Pacific gray whale populations. Other than mitochondrial diversity in humpback whales, levels of diversity were not lower in contemporary samples relative to prewhaling samples, indicating that commercial whaling had a minimal impact on metrics of genetic diversity themselves. However, it did have large impacts on the patterns of diversity, as evidenced by all coalescent‐based methods showing clear evidence of a bottleneck for both populations, whereas all but one method not based on the coalescent failed to detect a bottleneck.

中文翻译：

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利用开采前和开采后样品评估商业捕鲸对北太平洋东部灰鲸和座头鲸的遗传特征的影响，并比较推断历史人口统计学的方法

由于商业捕鲸，许多鲸鱼都经历了最近的瓶颈。这些下降是迅速的，并且相对于这些物种的寿命和世代时间而言是最近的，这引发了有关商业捕鲸在多大程度上影响这些种群遗传特征的问题。我们分析了两个种群的捕鲸前和捕鲸后样品的线粒体和核DNA，可以说它们显示出最大程度的恢复：北太平洋东部的灰鲸和座头鲸。我们还比较了不同方法的性能，以测试历史瓶颈并根据遗传数据推断过去的人口统计学。我们发现（在两个时间段内）灰白鲸的遗传多样性水平显着高于座头鲸，这可能是由于大西洋灰鲸和太平洋灰鲸种群之间的最近联系。除了座头鲸的线粒体多样性以外，当代样本中的多样性水平相对于捕鲸前样本并不低，这表明商业捕鲸对遗传多样性本身的影响最小。但是，这确实对所有基于联盟的方法都证明了多样性的模式，这清楚地证明了这两个种群都存在瓶颈，而除了一种基于联盟的方法外，所有方法都没有发现瓶颈。