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Abstract Catla catla (Hamilton) fertilised spawn was collected from the Halda, Jamuna and Padma rivers in Bangladesh from which approximately 900 individuals were retained as ‘candidate founders’ of a breeding population. These fish were fin-clipped and genotyped using the DArTseq platform to obtain, 3048 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and 4726 silicoDArT markers. Using SNP data, individuals that shared no putative parents were identified using the program COLONY, i.e. 140, 47 and 23 from the Halda, Jamuna and Padma rivers, respectively. Allele frequencies from these individuals were considered as representative of those of the river populations, and genomic relationship matrices were generated. Then, half-sibling and full-sibling relationships between individuals were assigned manually based on the genomic relationship matrices. Many putative half-sibling and full-sibling relationships were found between individuals from the Halda and Jamuna rivers, which suggests that catla sampled from rivers as spawn are not necessarily representative of river populations. This has implications for the interpretation of past population genetics studies, the sampling strategies to be adopted in future studies and the management of broodstock sourced as river spawn in commercial hatcheries. Using data from individuals that shared no putative parents, overall multi-locus pairwise estimates of Wright’s fixation index (FST) were low (≤ 0.013) and the optimum number of clusters using unsupervised K-means clustering was equal to 1, which indicates little genetic divergence among the SNPs included in our study within and among river populations.

Four farmed stocks and four wild populations of Nile tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus), which was first introduced to Madagascar sixty years ago, were assayed for genetic variation at nine microsatellite loci to determine levels of genetic diversity within populations and genetic relationships between them. Allelic diversity overlapped with that found in previously sampled populations elsewhere in Africa. There was no evidence of deviations from allele frequencies expected under conditions of Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium or of inbreeding in studied populations. Three distinct clusters of genotypes provided evidence of three separate introductions (from Egypt and Mauritius in 1956, and from Japan in 2011), and the occurrence of genotypes from more than one cluster within a single population provided evidence of their mixing. There were significant differences between populations which were not from the same environment (wild or farmed) or were not geographically related. Wild populations may be a valuable resource to support further development of farmed stocks from the perspective of genetic diversity.