Rocky Mountain Brook Trout harvest project genotypes

Sustainable management of exploited populations benefits from integrating demographic and genetic considerations into assessments, as both play a role in determining harvest yields and population persistence. This is especially important in populations subject to size-selective harvest, because size selective harvesting has the potential to result in significant demographic, life-history, and genetic changes. We investigated harvest-induced changes in the effective number of breeders ( ) for introduced brook trout populations (Salvelinus fontinalis) in alpine lakes from western Canada. Three populations were subject to three years of size-selective harvesting, while three control populations experienced no harvest. The  decreased consistently across all harvested populations (on average 60.8%) but fluctuated in control populations. There were no consistent changes in  between control or harvest populations, but one harvest population experienced a decrease in  of 63.2%. The /  ratio inc...