Fine-scale phylogeographic contact zone in Austrian brown trout Salmo trutta reveals multiple waves of post-glacial colonization and a pre-dominance of natural versus anthropogenic admixture

Abstract

Two major mtDNA lineages of brown trout come into contact in the upper Danube basin of Central Europe. The region is additionally confronted with stock management programs that often use domesticated foreign strains creating confusion as to what constitutes native and non-native populations as well as how to define major management units. In a unique system in north eastern Austria we provide additional support that the so-called Atlantic lineage of brown trout is native to the upper Danube and provide a high resolution microsatellite screening protocol that clearly distinguishes between natural and anthropogenic introgression, with the latter being minimal. Sequencing of 6,000 bp of mtDNA also shows that domesticated stocks primarily stem from a distinct albeit genetically diverse sub-clade of the Atlantic lineage, approximately 50,000–100,000 years divergent from the native Atlantic stocks, thought to have expanded into the region during the Holocene. The futility in defining large-scale management units based on mtDNA lineages for such broadly distributed and highly fragmented species is discussed.