Nine biomes and nine challenges for the conservation genetics of Neotropical species, the case of the vulnerable giant anteater (Myrmecophaga tridactyla)

Conservation genetics provides wildlife managers powerful tools to assist conservation planning, being recognized as an important biodiversity component. Nevertheless, communication between wildlife conservation actors is still not effective. Furthermore, wildlife conservation funds are often allocated to conservation actions incompatible with thorough long-term genetic research. In the Neotropics, the political organization of the territory, the complex socio-economic context, and the environmental heterogeneity impose additional challenges to the use of genetics for wildlife conservation. Here we present an assessment of the state-of-the-art on the conservation genetics of the giant anteater, as a study case. We use this species to discuss key wildlife threats and challenges along nine major Neotropical biomes. We review the main scientific research on the species, comprising and analyzing genetic data, and focusing on each biome and its region-specific threats. Our genetic meta-analysis reveals low levels of genetic diversity for the species, signs of population differentiation and dissimilar demographic trends per biome. Large-scale investigations are needed to disclose between hypotheses of panmixia, population structure and local adaptation, and to better assess the species demography. The limited information available for a known Vulnerable species perfectly illustrates the need for greater and internationally concerted investment in genetic/genomic research in the Neotropics. Finally, we describe the main wildlife conservation challenges per biome assessed, and present open research questions to which genetics could be of paramount importance.