As one of the most important native marine shrimp species in China, with smaller population was also found along the coast of the Korean Peninsula, the Chinese shrimp (
Fenneropenaeus chinensis) has played an indispensable role in China fisheries (
Deng et al., 1990;
Deng, 1998;
Liu et al., 2004). However, since the 1980s, once plentiful spring and autumn season landings of Chinese shrimp in the Yellow Sea and Bohai Sea declined. This decline has been mainly attributed to an increase in fishing, pollution and natural habitat destruction. Additionally, the traditional spring shrimp-fishing season disappeared approximately since 1986 (
Deng et al., 1990;
Deng, 1998). Meanwhile, suffering from the disease (white spot syndrome virus, WSSV) outbreak in shrimp farming, the total annual production of Chinese shrimp dramatically decreased from approximately 200 000 t in the late 1980s to 20 000–40 000 t in the 2000s (
Ye et al., 2005). After several decades of continuous practice, hatchery release enhancement was proven to be a useful strategy for natural population recovery of Chinese shrimp, and the fishery was also gradually benefiting from the strategy (
Wang et al., 2006). Meanwhile, different methods were developed to assess the recapture rate, a very important index in assessing whether an enhancement program is successful. These methods include marker-recapture methods with physical markers such as eye tags, visible implant elastomers (
http://www.nmt.us), code wire tags (
http://www.nmt.us) and radio frequency identification (
http://www.biomark.com), as the most commonly used (
Klima, 1965;
Marullo et al., 1976;
Luo et al., 2008;
Liu et al., 2013;
Xu et al., 2017). Considering the huge number of hatchery and the small size of released shrimp, obtaining precise recapture rates for assessing the effect of the enhancement impractical by injecting physical markers is impractical. Therefore, it was necessary to develop a new type of “marker” for “released shrimp tagging”, and further to produce precise recapture rate assessment.
Wang et al. (2014) provided a new distinguishable from previous physical tagging methods, which was based on individual identification and pedigree tracing using simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers and was successfully applied in recapture rates estimation in the Jiaozhou Bay and Bohai Bay in China in 2012. Regarding to the limited number of family individuals (named as molecular marker-tagging individuals compared to traditional physical-tagging individuals), including both hatchery released and detected from recaptured shrimp samples, however, previous research only provided limited data that not strong enough to support an overall assessment of shrimp released enhancement activity. Chinese shrimp was with significant migratory habitat. In its whole life cycle, there were three kinds of significant migration (over-wintering, spawning and feeding migration, respectively) that correlated closely with sea water temperature, bait, physiologic phase and hydrography. In addition to assess the enhancement effect, released shrimp identification and migration route tracing are also meaningful to clarify these following two puzzles: (1) Considering the biological behavior, whether the released hatchery shrimp stock is still consistent with their wild counterparts as well? In two fish species Mulloway (
Argyrosomus japonicus) and Largemouth Bass (
Micropterus salmoides), in which, higher levels of movement activity of hatchery-reared were discovered to be one of the key biological differences from natural stock, but lower survival probability of hatchery-reared was also found in semi-natural environments (
Garlock et al., 2014;
Taylor et al., 2017). (2) Could the released hatchery-reared shrimp have chance to develop spawner and further back to spawning plant after over-wintering as same as their wild counterparts at the next spring? Since besides to enhance the shrimp production, another important goal of hatchery release is to maintain self-sustainable wild stock (
Araki and Schmid, 2010). It was widely believed that up to 80% or more of Chinese shrimp autumn landing were from hatchery-released (
Wang et al., 2006;
Li et al., 2019); and it is different from coastal invertebrate species, whose sessile or sedentary behaviors can be helpful for them to form self-replenishing population (
Bell et al., 2005), Chinese shrimp need migrate to coastal area, especially estuary, to finish spawning just in part of life time. Hence whether the hatchery-released Chinese shrimp could finish a whole migration cycle is a signal of population self-replenishment and spawning plant improvement. Due to released individuals were too small to injected with physical marks, there were few studies focused on the pattern of feeding, overwintering, and spawning migrations of released Chinese shrimp. These questions were just speculated by the migration patterns of wild Chinese shrimp. Using microsatellite markers, we have an opportunity to do a realistic tracking description of them, which is of great significance for scientific evaluation of the ecological values of enhancement and releasing of Chinese shrimp. In this study, single-parent parentage identification in Chinese shrimp based on 8 SSR loci was used to trace the hatchery released shrimp in the Laizhou Bay in Shandong Peninsula in 2015, subsequently, the dynamic migration route and corresponding quantity changing of hatchery-released shrimp in the Bohai Sea were investigated and outlined. This research would be useful in enhancement effect and natural shrimp resource assessment, autumn fishing season landing amount anticipation, and even the dispute resolution of shrimp-fishing in the Bohai Sea.