Captive breeding programs are widely used for the conservation and restoration of threatened and endangered species. Nevertheless, captive-born individuals frequently have reduced fitness when reintroduced into the wild. The mechanism for these fitness declines has remained elusive, but hypotheses include environmental effects of captive rearing, inbreeding among close relatives, relaxed natural selection, and unintentional domestication selection (adaptation to captivity). We used a multigenerational pedigree analysis to demonstrate that domestication selection can explain the precipitous decline in fitness observed in hatchery steelhead released into the Hood River in Oregon. After returning from the ocean, wild-born and first-generation hatchery fish were used as broodstock in the hatchery, and their offspring were released into the wild as smolts. First-generation hatchery fish had nearly double the lifetime reproductive success (measured as the number of returning adult offspring) when spawned in captivity compared with wild fish spawned under identical conditions, which is a clear demonstration of adaptation to captivity. We also documented a tradeoff among the wild-born broodstock: Those with the greatest fitness in a captive environment produced offspring that performed the worst in the wild. Specifically, captive-born individuals with five (the median) or more returning siblings (i.e., offspring of successful broodstock) averaged 0.62 returning offspring in the wild, whereas captive-born individuals with less than five siblings averaged 2.05 returning offspring in the wild. These results demonstrate that a single generation in captivity can result in a substantial response to selection on traits that are beneficial in captivity but severely maladaptive in the wild.fisheries | genetics | parentage | rapid evolution | salmon C aptive breeding programs are commonly used for the conservation of endangered species and, more recently, for the restoration of declining populations (1-4). Mounting evidence suggests that captive-born individuals released into the wild can have substantially lower fitness than their wild-born counterparts and that these fitness declines can occur after only a few generations in captivity (5-8). Identifying the mechanisms that cause reduced fitness in the wild is vital for deciding if, when, and how captive breeding programs should be applied for conservation and management purposes (5, 7). Explanations for the rapid fitness declines (8-12) include environmental effects of captive rearing (including heritable epigenetic effects), inbreeding among close relatives, relaxed natural selection, and unintentional domestication selection (adaptation to the novel environment). Each of these mechanisms creates subtle but testable differences in patterns of reproductive success.Environmental effects of captive rearing, for example, could produce differences in fitness between captive-born and wildborn individuals but would not create differences in fitness among individuals that experienced ...