Document Type
Article
Abstract
Background
Yellowfin and skipjack tuna are globally distributed in the world's tropical and sub-tropical oceans. Since little, if any, migration of these fishes occurs between the Atlantic and Indo-Pacific Oceans, one might expect to see genetic differences between sub-populations in these ocean basins. However, yellowfin and skipjack tuna have extremely large population sizes. Thus, the rate of genetic drift should be slower than that observed for other tunas.
Results
Low levels of genetic differentiation were observed between Atlantic and Pacific samples of yellowfin tuna. In contrast, no genetic differentiation was observed between Atlantic and Pacific samples of skipjack tuna.
Conclusion
Much lower levels of genetic differentiation were found among sub-populations of yellowfin tuna compared to those observed for other large tunas, probably due to the large population size of yellowfin tuna. Since skipjack tuna appear to have even larger population sizes, it is not surprising that no genetic differentiation was detected between Atlantic and Pacific samples of these fish.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
Publication Info
Published in BMC Evolutionary Biology, Volume 5, Issue 1, 2005, pages 19-.
Rights
© 2005 Ely et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
APA Citation
Ely, B., Viñas, J., Alvarado Bremer, J., Black, D., Lucas, L., & Covello, K. et al. (2005). BMC Evolutionary Biology, 5(1), 19. https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2148-5-19