Concordia University
M.Sc. candidate
Supervisor: Dylan Fraser
Alison Derry
Start: 2017-05-07
End: 2019-12-20

Project

Evolutionary and demographic history of introduced Brook trout in national park alpine lakes
My research investigates introduced invasive brook trout (Salvelinus fontinalis) populations of nine isolated lakes in Banff, Kootenay, and Yoho national parks of Alberta and British Columbia. Originally stocked from the 1940’s to the 1970’s, the persistence of these populations presents an opportunity to determine the extent to which neutral genetic variation resulting from stocking, and adaptive genetic variation resulting from differences in environmental variables, affect their colonization success. My study uses whole-genome sequences of sex-differentiated pooled populations (pool-seq), resulting in over 28 million single nucleotide polymorphisms allowing me to establish nucleotide diversity, loci under selection, genome wide associations, historical Ne estimates, and FST calculations between lakes and sexes within and between lakes. Not only does this study help determine how colonization success is affected by stocking practices and environmental variables, but it also explores how introduction events differ between sexes.

Keywords

Fisheries, brook trout, genetics, evolutionary genetics, pooled sequencing, pool-seq, invasive species, salmonid