Olympia oysters (Ostrea lurida) are the only oyster native to the west coast of the United States and were once abundant in Puget Sound. Intense commercial harvests, habitat loss, and pollution led to collapse of the fishery by 1930. While small remnant populations have persisted in many areas across their historic range, dense core aggregations are extremely rare and thus the focus of several restoration programs across the West Coast. Puget Sound Restoration Fund (PSRF), in collaboration with NOAA and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, produces hatchery-bred juvenile Olympia oyster seed at the Kenneth K. Chew Center for Shellfish Research and Restoration. Juvenile Olympia oyster seed have been out-planted to a number of sites in Puget Sound for restoration.
A primary goal of the shellfish recovery effort is to have minimal negative impacts on existing wild stocks. While hatchery protocols are carefully designed and implemented with the goal of producing seed that mimic the genetic structure of local wild populations, characterizing the genetic makeup of out-planted individuals in relation to local wild populations is extremely important to determine potential impacts on the genetics of the recovering populations. To address this, we are using high-throughput sequencing (RAD-Seq) to produce thousands of genetic markers (single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs)) for 3 Olympia oyster populations and their hatchery-reared progeny. Preliminary results, including the development and analysis of SNPs to evaluate various genetic diversity metrics in out-planted seed, will be presented.