Research will aid understanding of mortality rate in Atlantic salmon
RESEARCHERS at Inverness College, part of the University of the Highlands and Islands, have contributed to the design of a new molecular genomics tool which could shed light on the high mortality rate in Atlantic salmon stocks seen over the last few decades.
Professor Eric Verspoor and Dr Mark Coulson, of the Inverness College UHI Rivers and Lochs Institute, collaborated with colleagues from Marine Scotland Science and 11 other research institutes across Europe to design the tool, which will help increase understanding of the marine ecology of Atlantic salmon.
The team collated a database of genetic information from 27,000 individual salmon from rivers across 13 different European countries, including Scotland, to create the tool. It is now being used to identify the regional origin of Atlantic salmon caught at sea and increase understanding of their migration path from various parts of Europe and why salmon from different regions have higher or lower levels of life expectancy.
The work features in a paper, ‘A microsatellite baseline for genetic stock identification of European Atlantic salmon,’ published in the ICES Journal of Marine Science this month.
Professor Verspoor, director of the Rivers and Lochs Institute, described the work as a “unique contribution” to salmon science.
“It is the culmination of a decade long collaboration among Atlantic salmon geneticists to exploit the potential for using molecular genetic tools in the management of the species and the first such baseline to be developed for Atlantic salmon,” he said. “It is currently being exploited along with other data sets of salmon caught at sea to help deliver new insights into the species’ marine ecology. The database is also being exploited to increase understanding of why the observed regional differentiation has evolved in the way it has.”
Professor Verspoor and colleagues across Scotland are using local data from the European-wide project to gain insight into how the regional patterns of differentiation have evolved in Scotland, from the time salmon first colonized the area more than 19,000 years ago. This work forms another collaborative paper, ‘Ice sheets and genetics: insights into the phylogeography of Scottish Atlantic salmon’, published online in the Journal of Biogeography this month.