Saving Seafood

Plenty of fish in the sea? Scientists can now count them using DNA

December 7, 2020 — One liter of ocean water can not only unlock the recent presence of dozens of species — it can also reveal the relative number of these fish.

According to the most extensive comparison of its kind, the relative abundance of DNA from different species found from ocean water samples taken off the coast of New Jersey correlates well with the data gathered by the more expensive and destructive technique of bottom trawling.

“It’s really going to be a game change for ocean science, with many applications,” said Mark Stoeckle, an environmental genetics researcher at Rockefeller University in New York City. He added that as DNA analysis becomes cheaper and more accurate, analyzing environmental DNA could be used for everything from tracking fluctuations in fish stocks due to fishing operations, to cataloguing the effects of climate change on species diversity and abundance.

Read the full story at ABC News

DNA surprises surfacing in the Atlantic: Species found far north of normal range

May 12, 2020 — The following was released by The Rockefeller University:

In brief: Rockefeller University scientists investigating shifting Atlantic Ocean migration patterns bottled the genetic traces of species far north of their normal homes.

By simply fishing for DNA in seawater, the researchers found Brazilian cownose rays and Gulf kingfishes – never known north of the Gulf of Mexico, and Chesapeake Bay, VA respectively – off the New Jersey shore, a 2 hour drive south of New York City.

The two-year study demonstrates an accurate, inexpensive way to detect long-predicted marine life range changes.

Author Mark Stoeckle and Director Jesse Ausubel of The Rockefeller University Program for the Human Environment are available for interviews.

The paper, “Improved Environmental DNA Reference Library Detects Overlooked Marine Fishes in New Jersey, United States,” published the journal Frontiers in Marine Science, is available at https://bit.ly/2WD6OXE

Read the full release here

Message in a bottle: Forensics meets marine science with eDNA

August 16, 2019 — It doesn’t look like much. At a glance, it seems Mark Stoeckle is holding a bottle of water to quench his thirst. But there’s so much more than H2O in that small plastic bottle.

Dr. Stoeckle pours the fluid through a special filter atop a glass contraption that looks a bit like a pour-over coffee maker. A yellowish gunk collects on the filter. Clearly this liquid isn’t potable. It’s seawater the scientist collected in Barnegat Light, New Jersey.

And that slime? That’s actually the stuff he wants. It potentially contains cells, or bits of cells, from as many as 20 species of fish that sloughed off into the water as the fish were going about their business. By sequencing the DNA fragments in that gunk, Dr. Stoeckle aims to identify which fish were swimming around the area just before he collected those water samples.

Read the full story at The Christian Science Monitor