Environmental DNA Collected In The Oceans Could Unravel The Mysteries Of The Whale Sharks

First Posted: Nov 22, 2016 03:20 AM EST
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Scientists could determine the population size and genetic properties of the whale sharks through the DNA floating in the oceans. By simply studying the seawater, the world's biggest fish, the whale sharks, could be saved.

The findings of the study were published online in Nature Ecology & Evolution. In the study, the team of researchers used the environmental DNA (eDNA), which the fish left in the water, to gauge the genetic characteristics of an aquatic species. They studied less than 30 liters of seawater, which was collected off the coast of Qatar in the Arabian Gulf, according to Mail Online.

From the eDNA collected, the team of researchers made an estimate of the size of both the local population and that across the whole Indo-Pacific. They also indicated that these whale sharks are genetically different from those whale sharks in the Atlantic.

Science reports that the team used the DNA to estimate the population of the female whale sharks to about 71,000. They also discovered that the Al Shaheen's whale sharks were just the same to the Indo-Pacific group than the Atlantic group.

Ryan Kelly, a marine biologist from the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle, said that the results are a conceptual advance. He further said that the researchers push the boundaries of what is possible to do with environmental DNA. Kelly envisions using eDNA to know the marine biodiversity in difficult to sample habitats such as rocky ocean bottoms that cannot be searched.

In the past and related study, which was printed in PLOS One, it indicated that eDNA gathered in Greenland showed which fish were most likely to be caught by deep water trawling. Peter Rask Moller, fish curator at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, said that scientists could get a quite detailed and clear picture of fish fauna using only environmental DNA.

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