Publication Date:
2022-05-25
Description:
© The Author(s), 2012. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Ecology and Evolution 2 (2012): 2588–2599, doi:10.1002/ece3.373.
Description:
In Massachusetts, paralytic shellfish poisoning (PSP) is annually recurrent along the coastline, including within several small embayments on Cape Cod. One such system, the Nauset Marsh System (NMS), supports extensive marshes and a thriving shellfishing industry. Over the last decade, PSP in the NMS has grown significantly worse; however, the origins and dynamics of the toxic Alexandrium fundyense (Balech) populations that bloom within the NMS are not well known. This study examined a collection of 412 strains isolated from the NMS and the Gulf of Maine (GOM) in 2006–2007 to investigate the genetic characteristics of localized blooms and assess connectivity with coastal populations. Comparisons of genetic differentiation showed that A. fundyense blooms in the NMS exhibited extensive clonal diversity and were genetically distinct from populations in the GOM. In both project years, genetic differentiation was observed among temporal samples collected from the NMS, sometimes occurring on the order of approximately 7 days. The underlying reasons for temporal differentiation are unknown, but may be due, in part, to life-cycle characteristics unique to the populations in shallow embayments, or possibly driven by selection from parasitism and zooplankton grazing; these results highlight the need to investigate the role of selective forces in the genetic dynamics of bloom populations. The small geographic scale and limited connectivity of NMS salt ponds provide a novel system for investigating regulators of blooms, as well as the influence of selective forces on population structure, all of which are otherwise difficult or impossible to study in the adjacent open-coastal waters or within larger estuaries.
Description:
This study was funded through the Woods
Hole Center for Oceans and Human Health,
National Science Foundation OCE-0430724
and National Institutes of Health 1 P50
ES012742-01, and National Science
Foundation OCE-0911031. Funding was
also provided by NOAA Grant
NA06NOS4780245.
Keywords:
Alexandrium
;
Amoebophrya
;
Dinoflagellate
;
Gulf of Maine
;
Microsatellites
;
Nauset Marsh
;
Paralytic shellfish poisoning
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
Format:
application/pdf
Format:
image/tiff
Format:
application/msword
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