Abstract
Effective population size (Ne) is a measure of the genetic size of a population and a crucial parameter for wildlife population management since it is strongly related to retention of genetic diversity in time and/or to inbreeding levels. Many exploited fish populations are stocked with the purpose of increasing population sizes to sustain important fishing pressures. However, stocking hatchery-reared fish could at the same time increase population census size and decrease Ne. Our study aimed at characterizing how stocking affected Ne in supplemented populations of Brook Charr (Salvelinus fontinalis) in Québec and at assessing how this relationship varied with the intensity of stocking (e.g. number of stocking events, number of fish stocked/ha, proportion of domestic genetic background). We estimated Ne with the linkage disequilibrium method in 54 populations (3361 sampled individuals analyzed at 20 microsatellites) with various levels of stocking intensity. We found that stocked lakes have significantly lower Ne than unstocked lakes. However, we found little evidence of an additional effect of stocking intensity on Ne of stocked lakes. Our results suggest that stocking may have a negative impact on Ne but that more intense stocking does not necessarily translate into lower Ne. However, even though low Ne in stocked populations could be attributed to an effect of stocking, it is also likely that stocked lakes consist of poor environments that translate into low Ne.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the Ministère des Forêts, de la Faune et des Parcs (MFFP), the Société des Établissements de Plein Air du Québec (SÉPAQ) for their invaluable help on the field and for providing database for some of our explanatory variables. We also thank R. Dubois, N. Bousquet, A.L. Ferchaud, A. Bourret and J. Létourneau for either their valuable comments on the manuscript, their help on the field and/or for statistical analyses and/or in the lab. We thank anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on our manuscript.
Funding
This work was supported by a strategic research grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) to L. Bernatchez, D. Garant and P. Sirois and also by funding from Ressources Aquatiques Québec (RAQ). Funding sources had no involvement in the collection, analysis or interpretation of the data, nor in the writing process.
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Gossieaux, P., Bernatchez, L., Sirois, P. et al. Impacts of stocking and its intensity on effective population size in Brook Charr (Salvelinus fontinalis) populations. Conserv Genet 20, 729–742 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10592-019-01168-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10592-019-01168-2