Genetic divergence between morphological forms of brown trout Salmo trutta L. in the Balkan region of Macedonia

Abstract

The objective of this study was to characterize the genetic structure of two Balkan brown trout morphotypes, Salmo macedonicus and Salmo pelagonicus, and to test whether molecular traits support the species' status proposed by traditional morphological identification. The mitochondrial DNA 12S-rDNA, cyt b and control region genes were sequenced in 15 specimens collected from three localities in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. The results of these markers did not support the taxonomic category of species but confirmed the existence of two morphotypes, Salmo trutta macedonicus and Salmo trutta pelagonicus, in the Aegean-Adriatic lineages of the Salmo trutta species complex.

Genetic divergence among native trout Salmo trutta populations from southern Balkans based on mitochondrial DNA and microsatellite variation

“…This haplotype, however, differs from Ad1 described in Bernatchez et al (1992) in a set of three mutational sites identified in the 3 -end segment of the control region (positions 6, 27 and 44 in Bernatchez et al, 1992), and consequently, none of the individuals sequenced possessed the Ad1 haplotype. Pair-wise sequence comparison revealed that this set of the three mutational sites is also shared by the rest of the haplotypes reported in this study, as well as by all Balkan and Iberian haplotypes reported so far (Cortey et al, 2004;Susnik et al, 2007;Snoj et al, 2009;Lo Brutto, et al, 2010). Pair-wise sequence divergence estimates among mtDNA variants detected in the 741 bp CR segment varied from 0·14 to 1·37% and are comparable with those reported by Bernatchez et al (1992) for a 640 bp of the CR (0·16-1·92%) (i.e.…”

Genetic Diversity and Conservation of the Prespa Trout in the Balkans

“…The present consensus taxonomy of the Salmo genus considers the AD (Adriatic origin), DA (Danubian), MA (marble trout), ME (Mediterranean) and AT (Atlantic) lineages as geographic subgroups within S. trutta. Like most Balkan trout taxa [7], S. peristericus and S. letnica , sampled for this study, belong to the AD lineage [8,9]. Only S. ohridanus is considered to be a distinct species [10].…”

Alternative Life-History in Native Trout (Salmo spp.) Suppresses the Invasive Effect of Alien Trout Strains Introduced Into Streams in the Western Part of the Balkans

“…This illustrates the great variety in their traits, but also introduces confusion in their taxonomy from the conceptual point of view. There are taxonomic studies and reviews (Bernatchez, 2001;Simonović et al, 2007;LoBrutto et al, 2010;Vera et al, 2011;Meraner et al, 2013) that consider Salmo trutta L., 1758, to be a species complex comprising phylogenetically closely related species, while others (Abolhasan et al, 2017;Kalayci et al, 2018;Sanz, 2018;Rezaei et al, 2019;Whiteley et al, 2019) consider this to be a single highly polymorphic species. Whiteley et al (2019) stated that the current taxonomic richness within the S. trutta was promoted by Kottelat (1997), who followed the evolutionary species concept of Simpson (1961) to assign local brown trout subspecies originally described on the basis of slight differences in a limited number of traits between local populations as nominal species (Kottelat and Freyhof, 2007).…”

“…presented here was recently supplemented with a prominent insight into their diversity, assessed using molecular markers, both mitochondrial, [e.g., cytochrome b and control region (CR), i.e., the D-loop (Bernatchez et al, 1992;Bernatchez, 2001), and nuclear, e.g., LDH-C * and several microsatellite loci (Hamilton et al, 1989;Richard and Thorpe, 2001)]. The basic mapping of indigenous populations of nominal trout taxa accomplished using CR as a marker in the Adriatic Sea Basin assigned them to the Adriatic (AD), marmoratus (MA), and Danubian (DA) mtDNA lineages (Marić et al, 2006;Mrdak, 2011;Mrdak et al, 2012;Simonović et al, 2017b;Škraba Jurlina et al, 2018); those native to the Black Sea Basin belonged to the DA lineage (Marić et al, 2006;Mrdak, 2011;Tošić et al, 2014Tošić et al, , 2016Simonović et al, 2017b;Škraba et al, 2017), whereas in the Aegean Sea Basin, they belonged to the AD lineage (Marić et al, 2006(Marić et al, , 2017LoBrutto et al, 2010).…”