Conservation genetics of the white-clawed crayfish
The white-clawed crayfish, Austropotamobius pallipes pallipes, still has a wide-spread distribution in France, but since the last century, populations have declined because of habitat alteration (due to human disturbance) and have been also eliminated by crayfish plague, for which introduced exotic species are a vector. Action plans for the conservation of A. pallipes are urgent and if recovery programmes are to be initiated in France, then it is important to estimate how much genetic variation is partitioned between remaining populations as the species is being currently threatened in all its European distribution. We show how a new molecular marker can be used to study crayfish populations. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) variation in natural populations was examined by restriction fragment length polymorphism analysis in samples taken from fifteen French populations and six European populations representative of three subspecies observed in A. pallipes in o