ORIGINAL PAPER Moderate genetic variability and no genetic structure within the European golden jackal (Canis aureus) population in Hungary Szilvia Kusza 1 & Krisztina Nagy 1 & József Lanszki 2 & Miklós Heltai 3 & Csaba Szabó 1 & Sylwia D. Czarnomska 4 Received: 20 March 2018 /Accepted: 16 July 2018 # Mammal Research Institute, Polish Academy of Sciences, Białowieża, Poland 2018 Abstract Demography of the golden jackal (Canis aureus) was affected by various events in the past, but today jackal populations are increasing throughout Europe. Despite the fact that it is one of the most rapidly spreading mammals in Europe, previous genetic studies detected low genetic diversity among and within populations. The Hungarian landscape is not highly varied; however, it is in the middle of the country’ s territory that the jackal’ s number is significantly increasing. Therefore, the main goal of our research was to further investigate the genetic diversity and population structure of the Hungarian golden jackal population based on a larger sample size than in previous studies ever, expecting that individ- uals from genetically differentiated subpopulations might meet in the area studied. Seventy golden jackals from the most populated area, Western Hungary, were studied with regard to genetic variability, differentiation, and structure as revealed by 385-bp-long mitochondrial control region sequences and 10 nuclear canine microsatellite loci. There was no variation at all in the mtDNA CR sequences, and nuclear variability was low (average observed and expected heterozygosity of 0.348 and 0.447, respectively). Furthermore, no obvious genetic structuring was detected in the studied population using GENELAND and PCA analyses. The present regional genetic structure and diversity of the Hungarian golden jackal is consistent with the previous results; however, it is the first analysis based on a relatively large sample size. We concluded that further molecular genetic studies are needed with a more specific marker set to have more accurate knowledge on rate of hybridization and genetic structure in golden jackal populations across Hungary and Europe. Keywords Canis aureus . Microsatellite . mtDNA . Hungary . Population structure Introduction The golden jackal (Canis aureus Linnaeus, 1758) is a group- living mesopredator (Macdonald 1983; Moehlman 1987), which is rapidly spreading in the central and southeastern parts of Europe (Arnold et al. 2012; Šálek et al. 2014; Trouwborst et al. 2015; Rutkowski et al. 2015; Kowalczyk et al. 2015; Ivanov et al. 2016). The jackal was extinct from most of its historical range in Southeast Europe in the mid- twentieth century (Demeter and Spassov 1993; Krofel et al. 2017). At the end of the twentieth century, the species started to spontaneously repopulate its long-lost habitats from the Balkan peninsula (Krystufek et al. 1997; Arnold et al. 2012) and then its number increased extremely fast in colonized areas (Szabó et al. 2009; Rutkowski et al. 2015). Similarly, the jackal population began to grow exponentially in Hungary Communicated by: Karol Zub Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s13364-018-0390-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Szilvia Kusza kusza@agr.unideb.hu 1 Institute of Animal Science, Biotechnology and Nature Conservation, University of Debrecen, Debrecen, Hungary 2 Carnivore Ecology Research Group, Kaposvár University, Kaposvár, Hungary 3 Institute for Wildlife Conservation, Szent István University, Gödöllő, Hungary 4 Institute of Biochemistry and Biophysics, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland Mammal Research https://doi.org/10.1007/s13364-018-0390-0