There exist geographic forms of short-finned pilot whales off the east coast of Japan, which comprise genetically isolated stocks.
This example has since been held up as an interesting case study on how the concept of species should be defined, as it presents the problem of "a monophyletic group comprising a paraphyletic basal group of incompletely differentiated geographic forms within which is nested at least one divergent, autapomorphic taxon that invites treatment as a species".
Of these, A. olivacea inhabits a wide range of contrasting environments and presents different geographic forms.
They are represented by more than 20 different geographic forms which are considered subspecies [ 13].
Along its distribution, it presents different geographic forms that make the olive mouse a good focal case for the study of geographical variation in response to environmental variation.
Led by the traditional concept of Lautensach (1953), the focus was both on the central peripheral and hypsometric variations of geographic forms (Formenwandel).
However, due to the hypsometric variations of geographic forms, these results may lead to misinterpretations if the land cover's distribution at different altitudinal belts (quechua, suni, puna) is not taken into account (Fig. 2).
Thus the recent tendency to split geographic forms into species based on fixed mitochondrial differences [ 49, 51] but see [ 52] is inadequate without investigating a panel of nuclear genes as well.
Colour pattern differences often depend on relatively few loci: this is the case for the geographic forms of Heliconius melpomene, H. erato, and H. numata [ 83, 88, 89, 98] as well as between H. erato and H. himera [ 37, 45, 90, 92] and between H. melpomene and H. cydno [ 47, 72, 98].
In our 3 populations, we found that neither individual SNPs nor the 3-SNP haplotype was preferentially associated with either the neovascular or geographic atrophy form of advanced AMD.
