Mixed evidence for reduced local adaptation in wild salmon resulting from interbreeding with escaped farmed salmon: complexities in hybrid fitness.

ABSTRACT: Interbreeding between artificially-selected and wild organisms can have negative fitness consequences for the latter. In the Northwest Atlantic, farmed Atlantic salmon recurrently escape into the wild and enter rivers where small, declining populations of wild salmon breed. Most farmed salmon in the region derive from an ancestral source population that occupies a nonacidified river (pH 6.0-6.5). Yet many wild populations with which escaped farmed salmon might interbreed inhabit acidified rivers (pH 4.6-5.2). Using common garden experimentation, and examining two early-life history stages across two generations of interbreeding, we showed that wild salmon populations inhabiting acidified rivers had higher survival at acidified pH than farmed salmon or F1 farmed-wild hybrids. In contrast, h

SUBMITTER: Fraser DJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3352379 | biostudies-literature | 2008 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature