M. Renee Bellinger

US Geological Survey Pacific Island Ecosystems Research Center

The evolution of endosymbionts and their hosts can lead to highly dynamic interactions with varying fitness effects for both the endosymbiont and host species. Wolbachia, a ubiquitous endosymbiont of arthropods and nematodes, can have both beneficial and detrimental effects on host fitness. We documented the occurrence and patterns of transmission...

Island bat species are disproportionately at risk of extinction, and Hawaiʻi’s only native terrestrial land mammal, the Hawaiian hoary bat ( Lasiurus semotus) locally known as ʻōpeʻapeʻa, is no exception. To effectively manage this bat species with an archipelago-wide distribution, it is important to determine the population size on each island and...

Singvögel und Lachsfische sind die bekanntesten Beispiele von Tieren, die sich bei ihren langen Wanderungen auch am Magnetfeld der Erde orientieren. Der Nachweis von kleinen Clustern aus Magnetit in den Sinneszellen von Lachsfischen weist nun auf hochinteressante evolutionäre Entwicklungen, ausgehend von Archäen, hin.

Significance We present a model of biogenic magnetite formation in eukaryotes and hypothesize this genetic mechanism is used by broad forms of life for geomagnetic sensory perception. Countering previous assertions that salmon olfactory tissues lack biogenic magnetite, we determine that it is present in the form of compact crystal clusters and show...

The plant genus Bidens (Asteraceae or Compositae; Coreopsidae) is a species-rich and circumglobally distributed taxon. The 19 hexaploid species endemic to the Hawaiian Islands are considered an iconic example of adaptive radiation, of which many are imperiled and of high conservation concern. Until now, no genomic resources were available for this...

The plant genus Bidens (Asteraceae or Compositae; Coreopsidae) is a species-rich and circumglobally distributed taxon. The 19 hexaploid species endemic to the Hawaiian Islands are considered an iconic example of adaptive radiation, of which many are imperiled and of high conservation concern. Until now, no genomic resources were available for this...

Taro ( Colocasia esculenta ) is a food staple widely cultivated in the humid tropics of Asia, Africa, Pacific and the Caribbean. One of the greatest threats to taro production is Taro Leaf Blight caused by the oomycete pathogen Phytophthora colocasiae . Here we describe a de novo taro genome assembly and use it to analyze sequence data from a Taro...

Hawaiian plant radiations often result in lineages with exceptionally high species richness and extreme morphological and ecological differentiation. However, they typically display low levels of genetic variation, hindering the use of classic DNA markers to resolve their evolutionary histories. Here we utilize a phylogenomic approach to generate t...

R script for taro linkage mapping using program onemap. This script was applied to create a linkage map for a taro mapping population resistant to taro leaf blight. The genotype file was constructed by calling SNPs using genotyping by sequencing data set using a taro genome reference genome available from NCBI's genbank under Bioproject PRJNA567267...

SNP-calling and genotype filtering using bowtie2, samtools, bcftools, and vcftools This pipeline was used for calling SNPs using GBS data obtained from Taro Leaf Blight resistant mapping population of taro, Colocasia Esculenta mapped to a taro genome assembled from 10x Genomics linked-reads and Oxford Nanopore Technology long-reads. The genotype fi...

Taro [Colocasia esculenta (L.) Schott] is an ancient, tropical root crop that is morphologically diverse with over 10,000 landraces. It is the fifth most produced root crop in the world and is mainly grown in tropical Africa, China, New Guinea, and many Pacific islands. Taro typically is grown for its starchy corm (i.e., underground stem), although...

Hawaiian plant radiations are well known to often generate lineages with exceptionally high species richness and extreme morphological and ecological differentiation. However, they typically display low levels of genetic variation, hindering the use of classic DNA markers to resolve their evolutionary histories. Hawaiian Bidens (Asteraceae) compris...

The rice coral, Montipora capitata, is widely distributed throughout the Indo-Pacific and comprises one of the most important reef-building species in the Hawaiian Islands. Here we describe a de novo assembly of its genome based on a linked-read sequencing approach developed by 10x Genomics. The final draft assembly consisted of 27,870 scaffolds wi...

• Anthropogenic influences on global processes and climatic conditions are increasingly affecting ecosystems throughout the world. • Hawaii Island’s native ecosystems are well studied and local long‐term climatic trends well documented, making these ecosystems ideal for evaluating how native taxa may respond to a warming environment. • This study d...

Reef‐building corals may harbor genetically distinct lineages of endosymbiotic dinoflagellates in the genus Symbiodinium, which have been shown to affect important colony properties, including growth rates and resilience against environmental stress. However, the molecular processes underlying these differences are not well understood. In this stud...

Significance Human activities alter and reduce phenotypic variation in many species, but the long-term consequences (e.g., ability of previous variation to reemerge), and thus the need for conservation action, are unclear. Here we show that dramatic, human-induced changes in adult migration characteristics of wild Chinook salmon are explained by ra...

Genome-level data can provide researchers with unprecedented precision to examine the causes and genetic consequences of population declines, which can inform conservation management. Here, we present a high-quality, long-read, de novo genome assembly for one of the world’s most endangered bird species, the ʻAlalā (Corvus hawaiiensis; Hawaiian crow...

Genome-level data can provide researchers with unprecedented precision to examine the causes and genetic consequences of population declines, and to apply these results to conservation management. Here we present a high-quality, long-read, de novo genome assembly for one of the world's most endangered bird species, the Alala. As the only remaining...

Anthropogenic habitat alterations can drive phenotypic changes in wild populations. However, the underlying mechanism (i.e., phenotypic plasticity and/or genetic evolution) and potential to recover previous phenotypic characteristics are unclear. Here we investigate the change in adult migration characteristics in wild salmon populations caused by...

Background Scleractinian corals are a vital component of coral reef ecosystems, and of significant cultural and economic value worldwide. As anthropogenic and natural stressors are contributing to a global decline of coral reefs, understanding coral health is critical to help preserve these ecosystems. Growth anomaly (GA) is a coral disease that ha...

Taro, Colocasia esculenta, is one of the world's oldest root crops and of particular economic and cultural significance in Hawai'i, where historically more than 150 different landraces were grown. We developed a genome-wide set of more than 2400 high-quality single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers from 70 taro accessions of Hawaiian, South Pac...

The field of conservation genetics, when properly implemented, is a constant juggling act integrating molecular genetics, ecology, and demography with applied aspects concerning managing declining species or implementing conservation laws and policies. This young field has grown substantially since the 1980's following development of the polymerase...

Understanding seasonal migration and localized persistence of populations is critical for effective species harvest and conservation management. Pacific salmon (genus Oncorhynchus) forecasting models predict stock composition, abundance, and distribution during annual assessments of proposed fisheries impacts. Most models, however, fail to account...

Highly magnetic receptor cells of trout that contain biogenic crystals of magnetite are hypothesized to transduce geomagnetic information into neural signals utilized by fish as orientation cues during migration. However, because these cells are extremely difficult to find and study, whether these cells are capable of magnetic signal transduction i...

Abstract Managing weak stocks in mixed-stock fisheries often relies on proxies derived from data-rich indicator stocks, although there have been limited tests of the appropriateness of such proxies. For example, full cohort reconstruction of tagged Klamath River fall-run Chinook Salmon Oncorhynchus tshawytscha of northern California enables the use...

The dynamic Quaternary geology of the Pacific Ring of Fire created substantial challenges for biogeography. Fish life history and population genetic variation were shaped by climate change, repeated formation and subsidence of ice sheets, sea-level change, volcanism and tectonics, isostatic rebound, and now human activities. It is widely recognized...

Starting in 2006 Pacific Northwest commercial ocean troll fisheries for Chinook salmon have been severely restricted or closed due to low abundance of Sacramento River and Klamath River fall Chinook. In 2005, anticipating the Klamath River fishery restrictions, a collaboration of fishermen, scientists, and seafood marketers initiated Project CROOS...

Starting in 2006 Pacific Northwest commercial ocean troll fisheries for Chinook salmon have been severely restricted or closed due to low abundance of Sacramento River and Klamath River fall Chinook. In 2005, anticipating the Klamath River fishery restrictions, a collaboration of fishermen, scientists, and seafood marketers initiated Project CROOS...

Contemporary demands on fishery managers and the seafood industry require innovative approaches for supplying resource and product information. Project CROOS (Collaborative Research on Oregon Ocean Salmon) is an industry-science partnership designed to address the recent closures of the West Coast salmon fishery while sharing information in near re...

Contemporary demands on public resource managers and the private seafood industry require new approaches for supplying resource and product information consistent with a future in which the stock and flow of information is effectively shared among scientist, producer, and marketer. This will support sustainability, improve profitability and efficie...

Genetic stock identification (GSI) is used extensively in fisheries applications and otolith isotopic composition (87Sr/86Sr) can be used to identify provenance in freshwater and anadromous species; however, each approach has inherent limitations. The potential to combine these methodologies to improve discrimination among populations has yet to be...

Data analysis tasks at an Ocean Observatory require integrative and and domain-specialized use of database, workflow, visualization systems. We describe a platform to support these tasks developed as part of the cyberinfrastructure at the NSF Science and Technology Center for Coastal Margin Observation and Prediction integrating a provenance-aware...

Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are appealing genetic markers due to several beneficial attributes, but uncertainty remains about how many of these bi-allelic markers are necessary to have sufficient power to differentiate populations, a task now generally accomplished with highly polymorphic microsatellite markers. In this study, we tested...

An international multi-laboratory project was conducted to develop a standardized DNA database for Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha). This project was in response to the needs of the Chinook Technical Committee of the Pacific Salmon Commission to identify stock composition of Chinook salmon caught in fisheries during their oceanic migration...

The European periwinkle snail, Littorina littorea was discovered in Pictou, NS, Canada in 1840. This snail’s subsequent rapid, conspicuous spread south from Pictou along the Canadian maritime coast and then along the New England and mid-Atlantic coast to New Jersey, its virtual absence in pre-European contact deposits, and its close association wit...

Two centuries of historical, archaeological, paleontological, geological, oceanographical and biological data conclusively indicate that the periwinkle snail Littorina littorea was introduced to North America from Europe either by Norse explorers 1000 years ago or by European colonists after 1840. Available genetic data do not indicate ancient dive...

Phylogeographical analyses conducted in the Pacific Northwestern United States have often revealed concordant patterns of genetic diversity among taxa. These studies demonstrate distinct North/South genetic discontinuities that have been attributed to Pleistocene glaciation. We examined phylogeographical patterns of red tree voles (Phenacomys longi...

Taxonomic relationships among red tree voles (Phenacomys longicaudus longicaudus, P. l. silvicola), the Sonoma tree vole (P. pomo), the white-footed vole (P. albipes), and the heather vole (P. intermedius) were examined using 664 base pairs of the mitochondrial cytochrome b gene. Results indicate specific differences among red tree voles, Sonoma tr...

We used a PCR-based species test and microsatellite genotyping to determine salmonid species composition and quantity of Chinook among Pacific harbor seal (Phoca vitulina) prey. Tests were applied to DNA extracted from all salmonid bones recovered from scat (fecal) samples. Condition of bone samples and quantity of DNA varied substantially. Althoug...