ABSTRACT
The preference for coastal habitats makes the harbour porpoise, Phocoena phocoena, vulnerable to fisheries conflicts and hence prone to die due to entangling in fishing nets. An opportunistic sampling of such casualties (134 individuals) in Norwegian waters was used to assess the genetic population structure of the species by SNP-genotyping at 78 loci. The results of genetic clustering obtained for these individuals failed to identify more than one genetic group. Likewise, the individually-based F did not meet an Isolation-by-Distance pattern, thus supporting the conclusion that harbour porpoise in Norway probably belongs to a single genetic group or population.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the fishermen that provided the samples and to Geir Dahle, who designed the SNP multiplexes. Arne Bjørge, Michaël Fontaine, Fernando Ayllón and Tomasz Furmanek are acknowledged for constructive comments, and Ralph Tiedemann for insightful discussions on kinship analyses.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
ORCID
María Quintela http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4762-2192
François Besnier http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7186-2121
Kevin A. Glover http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7541-1299
Data availability statement
The authors confirm that the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the article [and/or] its supplementary materials (i.e. Supplementary Material – Raw data).