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In 1985, Alec Jeffreys reported the development of multilocus DNA fingerprinting by Southern blot‐detection of hypervariable minisatellites or variable number of tandem repeat (VNTR) loci. This technology found immediate application to various forensic and scientific problems, including fisheries and aquaculture. By 1989, however, it was recognized by many researchers that inherent problems exist in the application of multilocus fingerprinting to large sample sizes as might occur in fisheries and aquaculture genetic studies. As such, individual VNTRs were cloned for single‐locus DNA fingerprinting. Although single‐locus fingerprinting ameliorates many of the problems associated with multilocus DNA fingerprinting, it suffers from the problem that electrophorectic anomalies of band migration within and between gels necessitates binning of alleles, thus underestimating genetic variability in a given population …