There has been recent revitalization of the West Australian pearl culture industry to a stage where annual production is now worth about $40 million. Mortalities of pearl shell transported to the culture farms and concerns regarding the state of pearl oyster stocks stimulated a series of research...

Using small numbers of broodstock for breeding often leads to random drift in gene frequencies between generations. Effective population size (Ne) is used as an indicator to assess the rate of inbreeding and loss of genetic variation in small populations. In this study we used six microsatellites,...