Development and characterization of 15 polymorphic microsatellite markers for North Pacific albatrosses using paired-end Illumina shotgun sequencing

All three species of North Pacific albatross are vulnerable or near threatened (IUCN 2013) yet microsatellite markers to study their population characteristics are lacking. We employed 250-bp paired-end whole genome shotgun sequencing on an Illumina MiSeq platform to discover microsatellite markers. We selected 16 candidate loci for screening in 36 Black-footed (Phoebastria nigripes), 12 Laysan (P. immutabilis), and 3 Short-tailed (P. albatrus) albatrosses from which we characterized 15 markers.