Publication Date:
2022-05-25
Description:
Author Posting. © NRC Research Press, 2008. This article is posted here by permission of NRC Research Press for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 65 (2008): 2623-2635, doi:10.1139/F08-164.
Description:
We assembled a comprehensive atlas of geochemical signatures in juvenile American shad (Alosa sapidissima) to discriminate natal river origins on a large spatial scale and at a high spatial resolution. Otoliths and (or) water samples were collected from 20 major spawning rivers from Florida to Quebec and were analyzed for elemental (Mg:Ca, Mn:Ca, Sr:Ca, and Ba:Ca) and isotope (87Sr:86Sr and δ18O) ratios. We examined correlations between water chemistry and otolith composition for five rivers where both were sampled. While Sr:Ca, Ba:Ca, 87Sr:86Sr, and δ18O values in otoliths reflected those ratios in ambient waters, Mg:Ca and Mn:Ca ratios in otoliths varied independently of water chemistry. Geochemical signatures were highly distinct among rivers, with an average classification accuracy of 93% using only those variables where otolith values were accurately predicted from water chemistry data. The study represents the largest assembled database of otolith signatures from the entire native range of a species, encompassing approximately 2700 km of coastline and 19 degrees of latitude and including all major extant spawning populations. This database will allow reliable estimates of natal origins of migrating ocean-phase American shad from the 2004 annual cohort in the future.
Description:
This work was funded by National Science
Foundation (NSF) grants OCE-0215905 and OCE-0134998
to SRT and by an American Museum of Natural History
Lerner–Gray Grant for Marine Research and a scholarship
from SEASPACE, Inc., to BDW.
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
Format:
application/pdf
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