58 
Fishery Bulletin 99(1) 
ments do not necessarily discredit the validity of the mo- 
lecular comparisons. 
Use of restriction site data in mtDNA holds promise 
for the identification and systematics of Sebastes and sug- 
gests the possibility of applications for stock identifica- 
tion. Larval and juvenile rockfish carry mtDNA that is ad- 
equate for PCR amplification (e.g. see Seeb and Kendall, 
1991; Rocha-Olivares 1998b). Combining molecular iden- 
tification with morphometry may solve many of the prob- 
lems of identification that accompany rockfish studies. The 
apparent coherence of closely related rockfish species that 
we observed in both cladistic and phenetic analyses sug- 
gests that we should focus our applications on groups of 
species that are presumed to be close relatives. The con- 
sensus tree depicting relationships among interior clades 
within the Sebastes parsimony tree did not unequivocally 
position those clades either in this study or analyses of the 
cytochrome b region (Johns and Avise, 1998; Rocha-Oliva- 
res, 2000). Consequently, determination of higher level re- 
lationships among Sebastes requires analysis of additional 
mtDNA regions. Moreover, because the divergence of mtD- 
NA sequences provides only one perspective of the evolu- 
tion of Sebastes divergence, the relationships inferred by 
mtDNA analyses must be corroborated by analysis of the 
interspecific divergence of nuclear genes. 
Acknowledgments 
We gratefully acknowledge the many crew members and 
scientists aboard the research vessels John N. Cobb and 
Miller Freeman who participated in collecting specimens 
for our study. L. Densmore and T. Dowling provided con- 
structive comments on early drafts of this manuscript. 
Three anonymous reviewers provided constructive com- 
ments. A.W. Kendall Jr. and M. S. Love contributed advice 
and insight that helped us develop this paper. 
J. A. Gharrett and D. Churikov reviewed drafts 
of this paper. This work was supported by the 
National Marine Fisheries Service Auke Bay 
Laboratory and the U.S. Geological Services (Bio- 
logical Resources Division) Western Regional 
Office in Seattle, WA (R.W.O. 32). 
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