10.5061/DRYAD.905QFTTMN
Abecia, Janine
0000-0003-4271-8830
Charles Darwin University
King, Alison
La Trobe University
Luiz, Osmar
Charles Darwin University
Crook, David
La Trobe University
Wedd, Dion
Charles Darwin University
Banks, Sam
Charles Darwin University
Diverse parentage relationships in paternal mouth-brooders
Dryad
dataset
2021
FOS: Biological sciences
Australian Research Council
https://ror.org/05mmh0f86
LP150100388
Charles Darwin University
https://ror.org/048zcaj52
Northern Territory Government (NT Fisheries)*
2022-02-24T00:00:00Z
2022-02-24T00:00:00Z
en
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6256581
25976930 bytes
7
CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication
While mouthbrooding is not an uncommon parental care strategy in fishes,
paternal mouthbrooding only occurs in eight fish families and little
studied. The high cost of paternal mouthbrooding to the male implies a low
risk of investment in another male’s offspring but genetic parentage
patterns are poorly known for paternal mouthbrooders. Here we used single
nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) genetic data to investigate parentage
relationships of broods of two mouthbrooders of northern Australian
rivers, mouth almighty Glossamia aprion and blue catfish Neoarius
graeffei. For N. graeffei, we found that the parentage pattern was largely
monogamous with the brooder male as the sire. For G. aprion, the parentage
pattern was more heterogeneous including observations of monogamous broods
with the brooder male as the sire (73%), polygyny (13%), cuckoldry (6%)
and a brood genetically unrelated to the brooder male (6%). Findings
demonstrate the potential for complex interrelationships of male care,
paternity confidence, and mating behaviour in mouthbrooding fishes.
Sample collection and preparation Samples of 115 N. graeffei (9 brooding
males, 90 offspring and 16 non-brooding adults) and 261 G. aprion (18
brooding males, 180 offspring and 63 non-brooding adults) were collected
across rivers of Northern Territory, Australia. G. aprion was collected in
five sites: the Mary River (AHMR), Adelaide River (DRAR) and Daly River
(OODR, SHFR, GJKR) and N. graeffei was collected from one site (Mary
River) using electrofishing. Non-brooding males and females were included
to provide basic population genetics context for our study including
allele frequency estimates required for parentage analysis. Each fish was
euthanized in AQUI-S (175mg/L for 20 mins) upon capture; brooding males
together with their offspring were bagged individually, labelled and kept
in an ice slurry until processed (see S1 – S3 for fish collection and
justification of method). Fish collections were made as part of a larger
study investigating trait variation in freshwater fishes, thereby
utilising specimens for multiple research purposes. These species are
abundant, widely distributed in the northern Australian rivers and not
considered threatened species (23). We randomly sampled 9-11 offspring
from each brooding male parent. This sample size gave us a 95% chance of
detecting the contribution of more than one parent (of either sex) to a
brood as long as the dominant parent contributed at least 22-30% of the
offspring (5,8; see S4 for explanation). Approximately 5-7 mg of adult
muscle, larval tissue or whole egg was collected and stored in 70% ethanol
until DNA extraction and genomic sequencing. SNP discovery and filtering
Samples were genotyped at single nucleotide polymorphism loci using the
DArTSeq method at Diversity Arrays Technology Pty Ltd, Canberra, Australia
(24). We used strict SNP filtering criteria to retain only high confidence
genotypes for parentage analysis using a combination of custom R scripts,
‘adegenet’, ‘dartR’ and ‘plotly’ packages in R (25,26,27,28) (See S5 for
detailed SNPs filtering and genetic diversity estimation methods).