Badger in New Ross, Co. Wexford, photographed by Edward Delaney
Last year, I published a paper with my co-authors about the genetic history of badgers in Ireland. Similar to my post last week, it appears that like the pine marten, the badger also shares haplotypes (mitochondrial DNA type) with both Southern and Northern European badgers. In contrast, the haplotypes found in Britain were more similar to Central Europe. Although, as in the pine marten situation, the picture is further complicated by the presence of the Irish haplotype in Scotland, and some of the Southern European haplotypes were also found in Central Europe. How the badger actually came to be in Ireland is still debated, but they certainly seem to share a similar phylogeographical (geography inferred using DNA) pattern with other Irish mammals.
This week, an article appeared in the Irish Times “Tb or not Tb: an answer to the culling question”. The article quite rightly highlighted Ireland’s terrible culling of over 6000 badgers every year in order to halt the spread of Tb to cows. However, in using the badger DNA study to help explain that Ireland’s badgers have an interesting genetic heritage, the badger was incorrectly labelled as a possible subspecies. The article points to behavioural, dietary and other differences in badger ecology that could help designate the badger as a subspecies. While it is possible that these factors may influence the management of Tb in an Irish context; it is not in my opinion enough to justify a reclassification of the species. Certainly from the genetics point of view, there is no reason that the badger should or could be sub-classified; there is simply not enough statistical support for such a theory. In fact, the status of the various badger species was quite clearly resolved by Del Cerro et al. (2010), where the badger in Europe (Meles meles) was present as far as the Volga river in Russia.
A recent point of view by Zachos et al. (2013) has criticised the recent fad of splitting species due to inferences made by genetic and morphological differences. While some cases of division may be justified due to hidden or crytic diversity, many of the classifications have been unnecessary according to Zachos, and at worse misinterpret the data.
And let’s say for arguments sake that we do designate the Irish badger as a subspecies; do we also reclassify all of our other mammals that have a different composition of haplotypes to Britain? If so, we will have to reclassify the pine marten, the pygmy shrew, and pretty much everything else. If all of this is to help protect the badger from culling, then we are failing yet again, as the badger (Meles meles) is already a protected species under Irish and European law*. A potential subspecies, lets call it Meles meles hibernicus for arguments sake, has no protection, and to grant it protection might turn into a bureaucratic paper mountain, and simply waste resources.
While I agree that we should not cull our badgers and I hate to see it continue, a quest for subspecies designation is not an appropriate solution. The Irish badger has an interesting genetic legacy in a European context (as do other Irish mammals), but this does not make it a subspecies.
* This article was updated on 17th of April 2013.
In the original piece a sentence read the following ” In fact Ireland is currently in breach of the Bern Convention for continuing to cull the badger”. I have since removed this sentence following an FYI from James O’Keffee, Head of the Wildlife Unit Dept, Dept of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (DAFM), stating that the badger culling is legal in Ireland and is done under under a licence issued to DAFM by the National Parks and Wildlife Section (NPWS) of the Dept of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht. There is an issue of outstanding documentation to the Council of Europe secretariat for the Bern Convention, but DAFM has lodged all data with the NPWS. An earlier complaint made by the Irish Wildlife Trust was dismissed by the Council of Europe, see Section 4.4. I apologise for the misleading context of my original sentence.
I also removed the following sentence as it may be confusing for readers “The only grounds for separation were: M. leucurus (Northwest and Central Asia), M. anakuma (Japan), and maybe M. canescens (Southwest Asia and Crete)”. Jacinta Mullins quite rightly pointed out that this sentence referred to the species level, while the main argument in this piece was about M. meles subspecies.
References
Del Cerro, I., Marmi, J., Ferrando, A., Chashchin, P., Taberlet, P., & Bosch, M. (2010). Nuclear and mitochondrial phylogenies provide evidence for four species of Eurasian badgers (Carnivora) Zoologica Scripta, 39 (5), 415-425 DOI: 10.1111/j.1463-6409.2010.00436.x
O’Meara, D., Edwards, C., Sleeman, D., Cross, T., Statham, M., Mcdowell, J., Dillane, E., Coughlan, J., O’Leary, D., O’Reilly, C., Bradley, D., & Carlsson, J. (2012). Genetic structure of Eurasian badgers Meles meles (Carnivora: Mustelidae) and the colonization history of Ireland Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 106 (4), 893-909 DOI: 10.1111/j.1095-8312.2012.01927.x
Zachos, F., Apollonio, M., Bärmann, E., Festa-Bianchet, M., Göhlich, U., Habel, J., Haring, E., Kruckenhauser, L., Lovari, S., McDevitt, A., Pertoldi, C., Rössner, G., Sánchez-Villagra, M., Scandura, M., & Suchentrunk, F. (2013). Species inflation and taxonomic artefacts—A critical comment on recent trends in mammalian classification Mammalian Biology – Zeitschrift für Säugetierkunde, 78 (1), 1-6 DOI: 10.1016/j.mambio.2012.07.083
