Genética de populações de pirarucus (Arapaima gigas) da Reserva Mamirauá e considerações sobre estrutura genética para a espécie

Abstract

The pirarucu (Arapaima gigas) is an important fishing resource in the Amazon which has been exploited since the XIXth century. There are indications of a decrease in population size in some parts of its distribution. Management is one of the strategies adopted to maintain fishing activity associated to the conservation of the species. We evaluate aspects of pirarucu populations in two places in the Mamirauá Reserve (Jarauá and Maraã), and compare these populations with those of Santarém and Tucuruí, analyzing their genetic variability and structure. In order to achieve this, seven microsatellite loci were genotyped for 463 pirarucus from Mamirauá Reserve collected along five years. Our results show a greater genetic diversity for this population in comparison to populations from Santarém and Tucuruí. Analyses indicate that management has been ecologically efficient, since there were no significant change in genetic diversity over the five years of study. Lateral migration, associated with a possible standardized return to lakes without spacial fidelity seems to have great importance for local genetic admixture. However, this admixture is limited in space, with a small degree of genetic differentiation seem between pirarucus from Jarauá and Maraã. When including more distant localities to the analysis, the differentiation is greater though geographic distance cannot explain all of this. We believe that a population decline in intermediate localities, probably caused by overexploiting is influencing the connectivity among the localities studied.