corn fed fins
Well-known member
I'm not sure who the author is, but it must be one of our local CPW biologists, as this came attached to another email. The information is a big surprise for everyone! Out of pure chance stocking actually did something USEFUL for a change. After decades of screwing up just about everything they touched, CPW pulled a rabbit out of its hat. LOL
"I wanted to let you know that we have some new genetic information regarding the Gunnison River Rainbow and how it obtained it's resistance. It appears that the Hofer crosses that had been stocked into the East Portal spawned with the wild population at some point. Although the genetic contribution from the Hofer was undetectable during our typical genetic testing, we ran a test on some of the fish that we had collected from the East Portal and exposed to whirling disease in the lab, and found that the Hofer resistance genes had been incorporated into the East Portal population. Fish that were homozygous (had two copies of the gene) for the resistance gene exhibited a high level of resistance, while those that were heterozygous (only had one copy) were less resistant to whirling disease. So, even though the proportion Hofer in these fish were low, overall making the fish appear more like the wild strain typically found in the Portal, they did at least retain the resistance of the Hofer, making the GRR the wild resistant fish that we know today...........so I thought I would pass this along since it was the final piece of the puzzle for what we had been studying down there"
CFF
"I wanted to let you know that we have some new genetic information regarding the Gunnison River Rainbow and how it obtained it's resistance. It appears that the Hofer crosses that had been stocked into the East Portal spawned with the wild population at some point. Although the genetic contribution from the Hofer was undetectable during our typical genetic testing, we ran a test on some of the fish that we had collected from the East Portal and exposed to whirling disease in the lab, and found that the Hofer resistance genes had been incorporated into the East Portal population. Fish that were homozygous (had two copies of the gene) for the resistance gene exhibited a high level of resistance, while those that were heterozygous (only had one copy) were less resistant to whirling disease. So, even though the proportion Hofer in these fish were low, overall making the fish appear more like the wild strain typically found in the Portal, they did at least retain the resistance of the Hofer, making the GRR the wild resistant fish that we know today...........so I thought I would pass this along since it was the final piece of the puzzle for what we had been studying down there"
CFF