Morphological and phylogenetic study of the Barbary sheep (Ammotragus lervia) at the Tlemcen hunting reserve.

Abstract

The Barbary sheep (Ammotragus lervia) is a hoofed animal ranked globally as a vulnerable species. The Tlemcen
hunting reserve is one of the structures that aims to protect, preserve and develop this species in ex-situ, but the
problem is that the reserve does not have the history of its provenance; On the basis of this observation, we have
highlighted our study, which is divided into two parts. The first part focus on a morphometric study targeting 42 adult
individuals, 18 of which were imported from the United Arab Emirates and 24 developed in Algeria; this study focused
on 18 variables including 15 quantitative and 3 qualitative. The data collected were subjected to a statistical analysis by
the software R which; the principal component analysis (PCA) and the ascending hierarchical classification that the two
populations are distinct from each other without significant separation since the work has was conducted on the same
species. In addition, we have been able to identify specific subjects of each population that can be used as breeders. As
for the second part, it is a phylogenetic study targeting the population of Algeria only, in which a molecular analysis of
6 collected samples has allowed us to obtain a partial DNA sequence of cytochrome b. We subsequently retrieved the
nucleotide sequences of cytochrome b from the same taxonomy from the GenBank database and processed all the
sequences by the MEGA software, after alignment by the ClustalW method. The phylogenetic tree showed that the
barbary sheep population of the Tlemcen hunting reserve is a North African subspecies.