Mémoire
| Résumé : | The red deer, Cervus elaphus, is a species of deer from temperate forests emblematic of Wallonia. The deer population has increased dramatically in recent decades and being the largest mammal in the region, the impact of this increase has been considerable. Deer can cause significant damage to their environment and to agricultural areas near-by. Its populations also represent a dangerous reservoir of pathogens that could affect or endanger vulnerable populations of surrounding animals. Today, the management of its population is left to hunting exclusively since deer predators have all disappeared from the kingdom. However, hunting can have its drifts. Previous studies have pointed out that the red deer population has been disturbed and artificially overburdened by the introduction of wild and bred foreign deer from various countries of Europe. Therefore, it is reasonable to further study the geographical origin of deer populations in Wallonia. To do this, two main molecular tools were used: microsatellite sequences and sequences from the D-loop region of deer mitochondrial DNA. The data resulting from their sequencing were studied through several methods. A first analysis of the subpopulations of deer slaughtered in Wallonia on the basis of their microsatellite sequences was carried out by the Bayesian program STRUCTURE. These results were compared with the exclusion tests from a pre-defined Walloon reference population carried out using the frequency-based method of Geneclass 2.0. The latter has also been used with a Bayesian method to assign deer excluded from the Walloon population to several European countries, including France, Germany, Scotland, and Poland. It has been determined that around 10% (97 individuals for STRUCTURE, 154 for Geneclass 2.0) of the total number of deer in the Walloon database (1550) can be genetically excluded from the Walloon subpopulations. A majority of those considered non-Walloons were assigned to Germany, closely followed by France, then Poland and finally Scotland.The NETWORK program built a network of haplotypes from mitochondrial DNA sequences from deer slaughtered in the Walloon Region that were then compared with the results of Geneclass2.0 assignment tests. The presence of haplotypes from Eastern Europe and Scotland is consistent with the results of assignment tests. Several other haplotypes of the Western European lineage have been identified, reinforcing the possibility that these individuals could have originated from either Germany or France. However, several individuals assigned to the Walloon population presented foreign haplotypes. More in-depth analyses with several different markers, both nucleal and mitochondrial, are needed to complete and confirm these results. |
