View article

Salmonid fishes exhibit high levels of population differentiation. In particular, the brown trout (Salmo trutta L.) demonstrates complex within river drainage genetic structure. Increasingly, these patterns can be related to the underlying evolutionary models, of which three scenarios (member‐vagrant hypothesis, metapopulation model and panmixia) facilitate testable predictions for investigations into population structure. We analysed 1225 trout collected from the River Dart, a 75 km long river located in southwest England. Specimens were collected from 22 sample sites across three consecutive summers (2001–2003) and genetic variation was examined at nine microsatellite loci. A hierarchical analysis of molecular variance revealed that negligible genetic variation was attributed among temporal samples. The highest levels of differentiation occurred among samples isolated above barriers to fish movement, and …