Microsatellites Reveal Population Identity of Individual Pink Salmon to Allow Supportive Breeding of a Population at Risk of Extinction

Abstract
Efforts to restore depressed populations of Pacific salmon Oncorhynchus spp. are often hampered by the inability to assign population identity to individuals in an admixture. This knowledge is of particular concern in supportive breeding programs, in which misidentification of individuals to population may result in progeny of mixed heritage, which, in turn, results in the erosion of the genetic population structure and of the existing genetic diversity and local adaptations of the target population. We evaluated two classes of genetic markers, allozymes and microsatellites, for estimating population identity of pink salmon Oncorhynchus gorbuscha in a supportive breeding program on the Dungeness River in Washington State. Fall-run pink salmon of the Dungeness River are the target of restoration, but they presumably overlap, in terms of timing, with an earlier summer run. Both marker types revealed similarly low estimates of relative genetic differentiation (θÌ, = 0.02), which suggests that there ...