Abstract

Freshwater ecosystems are among those most affected by human activity. Constructing artificial reservoirs can change freshwater biodiversity, thereby impacting genetic diversity (GD), which is crucial to population-level adaptation. The Maipo River basin, inhabited by the endemic silverside Basilichthys microlepidotus, is one of Chile's most impacted freshwater systems. In this basin, the species is divided into five populations. Recently, a new population was discovered in the reservoir Laguna Esmeralda (LE). We hypothesized that LE silversides possess less GD than other populations and originated from a single basin population. Our evidence shows that the LE is a genetically isolated population with evidence of low genetic variation, but not showing signals of bottleneck or significant reduction in GD. Results consistently identified two sites as unlikely to be the origin of the LE silverside population, suggesting that it was established by the immigration of many individuals from the other three populations.