Genetic Relationships of Even-Year Northwestern Alaskan Pink Salmon

Abstract
Even-year cohorts of northwestern Alaskan pink salmon Oncorhynchus gorbuscha, sampled from 13 Aleutian islands, 1 Kodiak Island, and 4 eastern Bering Sea streams, were surveyed electrophoretically for 29 protein-coding loci. We observed no significant genetic heterogeneity among collections from the Aleutian Islands or within the Bering Sea regions of Bristol Bay and Norton Sound. The Bering Sea and Aleutian Island populations were more closely related to each other than to the Kodiak Island population. This similarity may reflect patterns of post-glacial colonization from the Bering Refuge. Genetic comparisons of northwestern Alaskan pink salmon with Asian populations from Sakhalin Island suggest that the Asian fish are most closely related to the northernmost North American populations that we collected, i.e., those of Norton Sound. Homogeneity among Aleutian Island populations is notable because the islands extend nearly 1,000 km, a distance over which pink salmon populations in other regions ...

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