A lack of genetic diversity and minimal adaptive evolutionary divergence in introduced Mysis shrimp after 50 years

Abstract The successes of introduced populations in novel habitats often provide powerful examples of evolution and adaptation. In the 1950s, opossum shrimp (Mysis diluviana) individuals from Clearwater Lake in Minnesota, USA were transported and introduced to Twin Lakes in Colorado, USA by fisheries managers to supplement food sources for trout. Mysis were subsequently introduced from Twin Lakes into numerous lakes throughout Colorado. Because managers kept detailed records of the timing of the introductions, we had the opportunity to test for evolutionary divergence within a known time interval. Here, we used reduced representation genomic data to investigate patterns of genetic diversity, test for genetic divergence between populations, and for evidence of adaptive evolution within the introduced populations in Colorado. We found very low levels of genetic diversity across all populations, with evidence for some genetic divergence between the Minnesota source population and the introduced populations in Colorado. There was little differentiation among the Colorado populations, consistent with the known provenance of a single founding population, with the exception of the population from Gross Reservoir, Colorado. Demographic modeling suggests that at least one undocumented introduction from an unknown source population hybridized with the population in Gross Reservoir. Despite the overall low genetic diversity we observed, FST outlier and environmental association analyses identified multiple loci exhibiting signatures of selection and adaptive variation related to elevation and lake depth. The success of introduced species is thought to be limited by genetic variation, but our results imply that populations with limited genetic variation can become established in a wide range of novel environments. From an applied perspective, the observed patterns of divergence between populations suggest that genetic analysis can be a useful forensic tool to determine likely sources of invasive species.