COMPARISON OF METRIC AND PROTEIN VARIATION IN THE AUSTRALIAN BUSH-RAT, RATTUS-FUSCIPES-GREYII

A study of 18 skull and body characters in 13 reproductively isolated populations of R. f. greyii reveals significant heterogeneity between populations for all characters. For most characters, there is no statistically significant difference between small, island populations and large populations. The variance in each character is generally less in small populations than in large ones, but this difference is not statistically significant in most cases. A previously reported study of electrophoretically detected protein variation in these populations revealed fewer polymorphisms in small populations than in large ones. The relationships between the populations, as described by multivariate analyses of the metric and protein data, are similar. The distance between populations, as measured by the metric variation, regresses significantly on the time of isolation of the populations but not the geographic distance between them. However, both of these latter variables account for significant parts of the interpopulation protein variation. © Australian Journal of Zoology.