Allendorf 1993), inbreeding (Flick and Webster 1964; NRC 1995), relaxed natural selection pressures

Abstract.-Hatcheries play a key role in augmenting populations for conservation, harvest, or both, although rapid domestication and adaptation to hatchery conditions may lead to fish that are maladapted to natural environments. Three processes may lead to domestication: (1) negative selection against fish adapted to wild environments, (2) positive selection for fish that thrive in artificial conditions, or (3) relaxation of selection pressures. In this study, early life history traits and survival were contrasted among wild-and hatchery-origin lake trout Salvelinus namaycush reared in a common hatchery environment to address the hypotheses of processes leading to domestication. Examination of egg size, egg survival, fry deformity, and early growth rate found no evidence of negative selection against wild-origin lake trout or positive selection for hatchery-origin lake trout when reared in a hatchery environment. Wild-origin lake trout outperformed hatchery-origin fish in all life history traits examined, suggesting that relaxation of natural selective pressures may be occurring in the hatchery environment. Furthermore, the hatchery-origin strains failed to show maternal effects on egg size and exhibited limited variability in egg size and hatching time, as well as no significant differences in early growth rate, suggesting potential homogenization of life history traits as a result of the hatchery environment. Hatcheries have long been used to both provide fishing opportunities and to supplement declining wild population numbers. Despite their value and widespread use, however, numerous studies examining performance differences between hatchery and wild salmonids in seminatural to natural environments (termed ''natural'' environments hereafter) have found hatchery fish to be maladapted to natural environments. This has been attributed to genetic drift (Allendorf an

Adaptation to seasonal reproduction and environment-associated factors drive temporal and spatial differentiation in northwest Atlantic herring despite gene flow

Understanding how marine organisms adapt to local environments is crucial for predicting how populations will respond to global climate change. The genomic basis, environmental factors and evolutionary processes involved in local adaptation are however not well understood. Here we use Atlantic herring, an abundant, migratory and widely distributed marine fish with substantial genomic resources, as a model organism to evaluate local adaptation. We examined genomic variation and its correlation with environmental variables across a broad environmental gradient, for 15 spawning aggregations in Atlantic Canada and the United States. We then compared our results with available genomic data of northeast Atlantic populations. We confirmed that population structure lies in a fraction of the genome including likely adaptive genetic variants of functional importance. We discovered 10 highly differentiated genomic regions distributed across four chromosomes. Nine regions show strong association with seasonal reproduction. One region, corresponding to a known inversion on chromosome 12, underlies a latitudinal pattern discriminating populations north and south of a biogeographic transition zone on the Scotian Shelf. Genome-environment associations indicate that winter seawater temperature best correlates with the latitudinal pattern of this inversion. The variation at two so-called 'islands of divergence' related to seasonal reproduction appear to be private to the northwest Atlantic. Populations in the northwest and northeast Atlantic share variation at four of these divergent regions, simultaneously displaying significant diversity in haplotype composition at another four regions, which includes an undescribed structural variant approximately 7.7 Mb long on chromosome 8. Our results suggest that the timing and geographic location of spawning and early development may be under diverse selective pressures related to allelic fitness across environments. Our study highlights the role of genomic architecture, ancestral haplotypes and selection in maintaining adaptive divergence in species with large population sizes and presumably high gene flow