High-density SNP panel provides little evidence for population structure in European sea bass (<i>Dicentrarchus labrax</i>) in waters surrounding the UK
Author
Taylor, Martin ILamb, Philip D
Coscia, Ilaria
Murray, David S
Brown, Mary
Cameron, Tom C
Davison, Phil I
Freeman, Howard A
Georgiou, Katerina
Grati, Fabio
Haugen, Thrond
Karachle, Paraskevi K
Kennedy, Richard
Lanssens, Thomas
Lincoln, Harriet
Martinho, Filipe
McCarthy, Ian
Petroutsos, Spyros-Iasonas
Pita, Pablo
Pontes, João C O
Baucells, Marta P
Rangel, Mafalda
Roche, William
Sbragaglia, Valerio
Sturrock, Anna M
Taylor, Michelle L
Wogerbauer, Ciara
Veiga, Pedro
Verver, Sieto
Weltersbach, Marc Simon
Hyder, Kieran
Date
2025-05-14Publisher
Oxford University Press (OUP)
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The European sea bass (Dicentrarchus labrax) is a commercially and recreationally important fish widely, distributed across the Northeast Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea. Two distinct lineages that represent the Atlantic and Mediterranean regions have been previously identified, with a hybrid zone close to the Almeria–Oran front. The presence of fine-scale population structure within the Northeast Atlantic region is less clear. Here, we investigated population structure in adult samples obtained from the northern part of the Atlantic range surrounding the UK, Ireland, Belgium, Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Norway, along with outgroups from Portugal and the Mediterranean, using a panel of 41 K single nucleotide polymorphism markers. Population structure among Northeast Atlantic Ocean samples was weak in both spawning—(FST = 0.00022) and feeding—(FST = 0.00032) season data sets, with small pairwise FST values between sample pairs. However, average FST was larger between spawning samples than between feeding samples, with a pattern of isolation-by-distance among the spawning samples, but not the feeding samples, suggesting some biologically meaningful population structure. The largest pairwise FST values at both International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) rectangle and division scales involved a sample from the west of Ireland. We found no evidence of a gradient in “Mediterranean” ancestry among samples collected around the UK in our data set or in a reanalysis of a published data set where such a pattern had been previously identified. In summary, there was no evidence that sea bass in different ICES divisions within the Northeast Atlantic Ocean represents genetically separate populations. Further work is required to reconcile evidence from tagging and modelling studies that suggest the potential for demographic independence with the genetic data.Description
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC BY license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Originally published at: ICES Journal of Marine Science, Volume 82, Issue 5, May 2025, fsaf064, https://doi.org/10.1093/icesjms/fsaf064Citation
Taylor, M. I., Lamb, P. D., Coscia, I., Murray, D. S., Brown, M., Cameron, T. C., ... & Hyder, K. (2025). High-density SNP panel provides little evidence for population structure in European sea bass (Dicentrarchus labrax) in waters surrounding the UK. ICES Journal of Marine Science, 82(5), fsaf064.ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1093/icesjms/fsaf064
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