Large-scale in Norway finds the evolutionary fitness of wild Altantic salmon is being damaged after they breed with escaped fish from the country's huge aquaculture industry
, but most of our understanding of these dangers has been gleaned from experiments in laboratories and controlled settings.Geir Bolstad
at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research in Trondheim and his colleagues collected scales from 7000 adult salmon in 105 rivers in Norway, the world’s biggest producer of farmed fish. By examining a scale from each fish and genotyping just over half of them, the team analysed what genetic ancestry with farmed fish means for their pace of development.
Later in life, these salmon also matured more quickly and returned from the sea earlier to lay eggs. The net result: females descended from farmed salmon reached maturity 0.29 years younger and males 0.43 years younger than genetically wild ones.This faster pace of life due to genetic contamination is bad news because it is linked to a whole suite of traits that make salmon less well adapted to their environment, such as increased boldness and aggression.
The overall picture masks one striking finding, which is that the impact of farmed fish genes varies drastically between populations of salmon. For example, in those communities where natural selection had already produced extremely fast-growing fish, the introduction of farmed fish genes actually acted as a brake rather than an accelerator.
The differences suggest that conservation efforts to limit the impact of farmed fish genes should be directed at local rather than national levels, says David Murray at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK. “This is something we haven’t seen before regarding the impacts of farmed gene introgression and could only be determined from an experiment of this scale and scope,” he says.
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