Genetic Monitoring of White Sturgeon Aquaculture:

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On the Upper Columbia River in British Columbia and Washington, anthropogenic pressures cause pervasive mortality in early life stages of white sturgeon (Acipenser transmontanus), resulting in recruitment failure at the population level. A regional recovery initiative operating across the international border mitigates this problem through conservation aquaculture, in which eggs and larvae are collected from wild spawning events, reared in captivity to the juvenile stage, and released back to the river, bolstering survival and recruitment. The extent to which these efforts represent the population at large is unknown, and I am employing novel polyploid genomic resources to investigate. I am directly assessing the capture of genetic diversity by measuring and comparing diversity metrics between multiple year classes of released offspring and a robust sample of wild adults, which was collected through the initiative’s long-term capture-mark-recapture program. I have expanded on diversity capture analysis by performing sib-ship reconstruction among released offspring to
quantify total and effective numbers of wild parents represented and thereby characterize potential for genetic drift. Furthermore, I am conducting parentage analysis between aquaculture offspring and the wild adult sample, linking individual adults to specific spawning events to infer unknown reproductive behaviors, such as spawning periodicity and site fidelity. Our results will inform this conservation aquaculture program, as well as recovery programs for other sturgeon populations and species, with respect to adaptive management to maximize diversity representation.