Laserfiche WebLink
<br />rivers are moderately to highly divergent from the Colorado River subbasin and they are highly <br />to greatly diverged from the Dolores River subbasin. The San Juan subbasin shows high to great <br />divergence from the other systems, with the exception of two sites (26 and 27) which show <br />moderate divergence from the Yampa and White river subbasins. The Fst values indicate that <br />each major river system contains its own unique assemblage of speckled dace. Variation within <br />those river systems exists but generally cannot be shown to be significant, either due to sample <br />size or lack of strong divergence. <br /> <br />In addition to the Fst indices, we generated Nm values (Table 7). These are estimates of the <br />number of migrants between pairs of populations per generation. They are a function of the Fst <br />values in Table 6 and generally high numbers of migrants are predicted within major drainages <br />and low numbers between drainages. Proper interpretation of these projections requires <br />consideration of a historical component (or phylogenetic signal) that is ignored in F statistics. <br />That is, individuals can be identical or similar by descent rather than identical because of recent <br />migration events. Assume that genetically homogeneous ancestral fish initially entered all of the <br />river systems. Over time, some of the individuals in the new populations would begin to <br />diverge, but others could still retain the ancestral genotype. This would, on a population genetic <br />time scale (ie. recent), be interpreted as evidence of migration when in fact no migration may <br />have occurred in the past thousand or more years. For example, only unique speckled dace <br />haplotypes are found in the San Juan subbasin (Table 5), but both the Fst and Nm values (Tables <br />6 and 7) suggest ongoing genetic interchange between the San Juan and Yampa rivers. We <br />therefore recommend caution in viewing the Fst and Nm values alone to interpret the degree of <br />uniqueness of populations. <br /> <br />The analysis of molecular variance (Table 8) shows that most of the variability occurs within <br />populations (81.63%). This result was anticipated in the review of Table 5. Most of the <br />remaining variability occurred between the different river subbasins (17.89%). Within river <br />subbasin variation was less than 1 %. The fixation indices also show this same result, where Fsc, <br />the F statistic between populations and groups by river subbasin (c), was 0.0058 while both Fst <br />and Fct had much higher index values. The values for both Fst and Fct were highly significant <br />while that for Fsc was not significant. This again indicates that strong within population genetic <br />structuring exists as well as differences between the major river systems, but little genetic <br />variation exists among populations within the river subbasins. <br /> <br />A visual representation of the major haplotypes in each population (Figure 2) shows how the <br />haplotypes are distributed among populations. The Gunnison site is not included because only <br />unique haplotypes were found in that system. The dominant speckled dace haplotype, <br />designated as haplotype A (Table 9, also haplotype I Table 5), is found throughout all drainages <br />except the San Juan. This haplotype is most abundant in the Dolores and Colorado River <br />subbasins, but occurs sporadically in lower frequencies in both the White and Yampa rivers. <br />Although not the most abundant form in the Little Snake River, haplotype 0 (haplotype 78), <br />appears to be the dominant pattern in the Yampa subbasin. Haplotype I dominates the White <br />River subbasin and, as noted above, haplotype A dominates the Colorado and Dolores subbasins. <br />Haplotype D tends to be a second abundant pattern in the Dolores River, but it was also found at <br />site 13 (Rifle Creek) in the Colorado River subbasin. The San Juan subbasin is dominated by <br />haplotypes E and F. The assorting of various abundant haplotypes by subbasins indicates that <br />while some gene flow may be occurring, within subbasin movement of fish is more likely. <br /> <br />31 <br />