A Rapid, High-Throughput Technique for Detecting Tanner Crabs Chionoecetes bairdi Illegally Taken in Alaska's Snow Crab Fishery

Abstract

Tanner crabs Chionoecetes bairdi and snow crabs C. opilio are both important commercial species for Alaskan fisheries. The geographical ranges of Tanner and snow crabs overlap in the southeastern Bering Sea where a commercial fishery targets the more abundant snow crabs. Morphological identification of these species and of hybrids has proven difficult and impedes monitoring of the harvests. Techniques for the genetic identification of these species have been developed, but it may not be possible to process the desired number of samples because of throughput limitations and sample requirement constraints. Here we present a rapid, high-throughput assay for identifying these species based on single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the nuclear rRNA internal transcribed spacer 1 region and the mitochondrial DNA 16S rRNA gene. These SNPs can also be used to infer the direction of hybridization (i.e., the species of each gender).