Abstract
Growing demands for marine fish products is leading to increased pressure on already depleted wild populations and a rise in aquaculture production. Consequently, more captive-bred fish are released into the wild through accidental escape or deliberate releases. The increased mixing of captive-bred and wild fish may affect the ecological and/or genetic integrity of wild fish populations. Unambiguous identification tools for captive-bred fish will be highly valuable to manage risks (fisheries management) and tracing of escapees and seafood products (wildlife forensics). Using single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) data from captive-bred and wild populations of Atlantic cod Gadus morhua L. and sole Solea solea L., we explored the efficiency of population and parentage assignment techniques for the identification and tracing of captive-bred fish. Simulated and empirical data were used to correct for stochastic genetic effects. Overall, parentage assignment performed well when a large effective population size characterized the broodstock and escapees originated from early generations of captive breeding. Consequently, parentage assignments are particularly useful from a fisheries management perspective to monitor the effects of deliberate releases of captive-bred fish on wild populations. Population assignment proved to be more efficient after several generations of captive breeding, which makes it a useful method in forensic applications for well-established aquaculture species. We suggest the implementation of a case-by-case strategy when choosing the best method.
Highlights
Aquaculture is one of the fastest growing food-producing sectors and will remain so in the foreseeable future due to a growing human demand for animal protein and lipids (Braithwaite & Salvanes 2010) and the limits that have been reached for wild-capture fisheries production (FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture Department 2014)
This study has evaluated the relative power of parentage-based tagging (PBT) and individual assignment (IA) for identifying the population of origin of marine aquaculture fish under a range of scenarios, highlighting the benefits and disadvantages of each
PBT potentially offers the strongest line of traceability evidence, as the identification of a specific parental pair with high confidence is likely to be more powerful than a combined population assignment and exclusion approach under IA, where aquaculture and wild populations have not diverged significantly
Summary
Aquaculture is one of the fastest growing food-producing sectors and will remain so in the foreseeable future due to a growing human demand for animal protein and lipids (Braithwaite & Salvanes 2010) and the limits that have been reached for wild-capture fisheries production (FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture Department 2014) This has led to various challenges related to the aquaculture industry, including organic, chemical and pharmaceutical pollution (Seymour & Bergheim 1991), infectious diseases (Murray & Peeler 2005), feed supply (Naylor et al 2000, 2009, Natale et al 2013) and escapees (Kitada et al 2009, Glover 2010, Glover et al 2011, Noble et al 2014). Genetic identification methods for farmed and wild marine fish species would be extremely valuable in aquaculture and fisheries management and wildlife forensics
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