Admixture mapping among three hybridizing sapsucker (Sphyrapicus) species shows importance of the Z chromosome in phenotypic differentiation and speciation

Authors

Natola, L., Hudon, J., Irwin, D.

Abstract

Plumage pigmentation is under intense sexual and natural selection and plays an important role in the speciation process in birds, so there is much interest in uncovering the genomic basis of plumage colour differences between populations and species. Three species of North American woodpeckers, the red-breasted (Sphyrapicus ruber), red-naped (S. nuchalis), and yellow-bellied sapsuckers (S. varius), provide a particularly promising opportunity to unravel the genomic mechanisms of plumage colour differentiation. The breeding ranges of the three species are mostly non-overlapping but adjacent, with hybrid zones occurring where the ranges meet. The species pair with the most similar plumage colouration (S. varius and S. nuchalis) is not the most closely related pair genomically (S. nuchalis and S. ruber is), providing an opportunity to determine the subset of the genome that underlies the plumage colour variation. Using admixture mapping of whole genome sequences from each species and hybrids from each species pair, we show close associations between the colour of multiple plumage patches and wide swathes of the Z-chromosome. These results highlight how comparable changes in one sex chromosome can cause either slight plumage pigmentation changes (S. varius vs. S. nuchalis) or large-scale shifts from dimorphism to monomorphism and from primarily black and white to primarily red plumage colouration (S. varius and S. nuchalis vs. S. ruber).

Preprint server: bioRxiv
The authors list and abstract were imported from bioRxiv on 21 Aug 2026.

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