Variance of reproductive success in the European flat oyster Ostrea edulis assessed by microsatellite-based parentage analyses in a natural population and in hatchery
2006
Lallias, Delphine | Taris, Nicolas | Boudry, Pierre | Bonhomme, Francois | Lapegue, Sylvie
he European flat oyster (Ostrea edulis L.) is a marine bivalve whose natural geographical distribution ranges along the European Atlantic coast from Norway to Morocco, in addition to the Mediterranean and Black Sea. Previous studies of allozymes, microsat-ellites and mitochondrial differentiation over the whole range concluded that a significant divergence existed between Mediterranean and Atlantic populations, together with an isolation-by-distance pattern. However, the average mitochondrial haplotypic diversity displayed a high among populations variance, reflecting smaller effective population size in some locations. Additionally, a ten-fold quantitative difference was observed in the same study in Fst between the mitochondrial and the nuclear genomes, which could be due to sex biased differential reproductive success between males and females. In order to further document this hypothesis, two experiments were conducted. First, brooding females were sampled in a wild population and the number of males fertilizing a given female estimated. Then, parentage analyses were achieved under experimental conditions: successive mass spawnings were collected from a population of potential genitors kept in hatchery, whose genotypes were known, in order to infer a posteriori the relative contribution of each genitor. Moreover, we aimed to better understand the reproduction dynamics of this species. Several patterns of spawning could be distinguished: unique, successive or extended in time. The different parental contributions and reproductive behaviors observed in these experiments are discussed in the context of the hypothesis of a variance in the reproductive success of males and females and consequences in local and temporal reduced effective population sizes.
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