Evolution of age and length at maturation of Alaskan salmon under size-selective harvest.

ABSTRACT: Spatial and temporal trends and variation in life-history traits, including age and length at maturation, can be influenced by environmental and anthropogenic processes, including size-selective exploitation. Spawning adults in many wild Alaskan sockeye salmon populations have become shorter at a given age over the past half-century, but their age composition has not changed. These fish have been exploited by a gillnet fishery since the late 1800s that has tended to remove the larger fish. Using a rare, long-term dataset, we estimated probabilistic maturation reaction norms (PMRNs) for males and females in nine populations in two basins and correlated these changes with fishery size selection and intensity to determine whether such selection contributed to microevolutionary changes in matu

SUBMITTER: Kendall NW 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3927891 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature