Abstract

The queen conch (Strombus gigas) is a western Atlantic Gastropod and one of the Caribbean species in the family Strombidae. It is the most important mollusk in the area. Due to the artisanal fisheries that the conch has supported for centuries in the Caribbean Sea increased fishing pressures led to the decline of the stock. Since the 1970s several private and public efforts are being made to recover the species from commercial exploitation, but to date queen conch are still considered a "commercially threatened species". My hypothesis is that queen conch populations throughout the Caribbean are interconnected due to larval transport resulting gene flow among populations in different locations effectively creating a metapopulation of queen conch in the Intra-Americas Sea. If this is the case, intemational efforts would need to be coordinated to ensure recovery of fue species throughout the Intra-Americas Sea. In a preliminary analysis queen conch samples were collected, preserved, followed by DNA extraction and amplification with PCR methods, and surveyed for amplified fragment length polyrnorphisms (AFLP), amulti-locus DNA fingerprint technique. Results suggest a relatively genetic uniform species-specific fingerprint pattern in Strombus gigas from Andros Island, Bahamas and the possibility of working with conch genomic DNA, which are important steps in future genetic studies of queen conch.

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