BIOCHEMICAL GENETIC POPULATION STRUCTURE OF YELLOWFIN SOLE, UMANDA ASPERA, OF THE NORTH PACIFIC OCEAN AND BERING SEA

• Main Authors: W. Stewart Grant, Richard Bakkala, Fred M. Utter, David J. 'reel
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Bering Sea; Gulf of Alaska; Pacific; Alaska
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.523.2260; http://fishbull.noaa.gov/81-4/grant.pdf

The gene products of 31 protein-coding loci were examined electrophoretically in samples ofyellowfin sole from the North Pacific Ocean and Bering Sea to assess genetic population structure. Four loci,Ada-2, Gpi-l, Pep-2, andPgd, were polymorphic where the frequency of the most common allele was <0.95 and were used to test for allele-frequency differences within and between stock areas defined by life history and tagging data. A nested contingency-table analysis of allelic frequencies showed that there were no genetic sub-divisions either within the eastern Bering Sea or within the Gulf of Alaska. At the next higher nested level, genetic heterogeneity was detected for the Japan-Bering Sea comparison at two loci and for the Japan-Bering Sea-GulfofAlaska comparison at four loci. Genetic distances between pairs ofsamples within each of the genetic units averaged 0.0005 (±0.0003), but averaged 0.0049 (±0.0026) between samples from these groups. The results of a gene-diversity analysis showed that 95.7 % of the total genetic variation was con-tained on average within populations and that 3.6 % was due to differences between Japanese, Bering Sea, and Gulf of Alaska fish. The remaining 0.7 % of the genetic diversity was due to differences between pop-ulations within these groups. The genetic differences between Bering Sea and Gulf ofAlaska fish are due pro-bably to genetic isolation and divergence caused by coastal glaciation in the Pleistocene Period.