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Belugas from the Hudson Bay-Strait Complex are harvested by hunters from Nunavik and Nunavut communities. In past studies, a genetic mixture analysis (GMA) was used to determine the contribution of animals from the Western Hudson Bay (WHB) and Eastern Hudson Bay (EHB) populations to harvests in the different management units. The population definition of WHB and EHB relied on short haplotypes from the mitochondrial (mt) DNA control region. However, studies with long haplotypes have shown that four populations could be identified in the Hudson Bay-Strait Complex. Here, we aim to 1) revisit the definition of populations within this area by resequencing and comparing short and long haplotypes for the mtDNA control region of 2 861 belugas, and 2) update the relative contribution of the newly-defined reference groups in management units using a GMA. Long haplotypes confirmed the existence of four previously defined populations, WHB, EHB, James Bay (JAM), and Cumberland Sound (CSB). They also allowed for the identification of a fifth population in the Belcher Islands (BEL). For the second objective, we tested the validity of the five populations using a leave-one-out approach and observed a high rate of erroneous assignments between EHB and BEL populations. Misassignments were due to shared genetic matrilineages and possible admixture during summer. Assignments were improved when EHB and BEL populations were combined in as a single reference named BEL-EHB stock. The GMA with the four new reference groups (WHB, JAM, CSB populations and BEL-EHB stock) led to higher proportions of the BEL-EHB stock in the fall harvest in Hudson Strait (5.6%) and Northeastern Hudson Bay (14.9%), and year-round in Sanikiluaq (3.3 to 61.2%), compared to previous studies using only two reference groups. Changes in reference groups, and not resequencing, likely caused most of the variation in the proportional estimate of the BEL-EHB stock in management units. Results from this study have increased the accuracy of the proportional contribution from reference groups to the harvest by the Nunavik and Nunavut (Sanikiluaq) communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Harvests of the Eastern Hudson Bay (EHB) summer stock are limited by a management plan that ends in 2020. This document updates the status of the stock using new harvest (up until 2019) and genetics data (up until 2018). The analyses indicate that the overall proportions of EHB beluga in the Hudson Strait harvest were 11.7% in spring and 29.1% in fall; for Ungava Bay the proportion was 6% in spring. In northeastern Hudson Bay fall harvest the proportion was 44.5%. Limited sample size from the Ungava Bay fall and northeastern Hudson Bay spring harvests precluded the breakdown by season for these regions. The population model produced a median abundance estimate of 3,300 animals in 2019, a slight decrease from the previous estimate of 3,400 animals in 2014 (rounded to the nearest 100). The annual Sustainable Yield, which maintains a stable population (50% probability of decline), was 58 belugas for 5 years or 62 animals if evaluated over 10 years. The Potential Biological Removal is 14 animals per year assuming a recovery factor of 0.25. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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