Evidence for Two Highly Differentiated Herring Groups at Goose Bank in the Barents Sea and the Genetic Relationship to Pacific Herring, Clupea pallasi

Genetic studies on Atlantic herring, Clupea harengus, have generally revealed a low level of genetic variation over large geographic areas. Genetically distinct herring populations in some of the Norwegian fjords are exceptions, and juvenile herring from the large oceanic herring, Norwegian Spring Spawners (NSS), are often found in mixture with local fjord populations as well as widely distributed in the Barents Sea. Research surveys in the eastern Barents Sea (Goose Bank) in 1993, 1994 and 2001 included collection of herring samples for allozyme analyses. As expected the results identified juveniles from NSS stock, but an additional unique group of herring (low vertebrae number), being almost fixed for alternative alleles at several allozyme loci, was detected. In some cases, the two groups of herring were taken in the same trawl catches as documented by highly significant departure from Hardy—Weinberg expectation with large excess of homozygotes providing evidence for population mixing. Large genetic differences (Nei's genetic distance = 1.53; F_ST = 0.754) were detected in pairwise comparisons based on five allozyme loci. The two herring groups were also compared with reference samples of Pacific herring, Clupea pallasi, including one sample from Japan Sea and three Alaskan samples. UPGMA dendrogram based on five allozyme loci revealed a close genetic relationship between the low vertebrae herring in the Barents Sea and the group of samples of Pacific herring. Although significant different in allele frequencies, one of the herring samples clustered together with the reference sample from Bering Sea with genetic distance of 0.008 and F_ST value of 0.032. The close genetic relationship found in this paper, suggest a re-evaluation of the taxonomic status of the Barents Sea herring populations investigated.