Naiara Rodriguez-Ezpeleta: Tracking fishes through their DNA
Channel: Fishbase Sweden
Date: 08/11/2023

Naiara Rodriguez-Ezpeleta, ASTI, Spain, gave a lecture on "Tracking fishes through their DNA" at FishBase Symposium 2023 in Stockholm, Sweden, October 16, 2023.

ABSTRACT:  Achieving a sustainable fisheries management relies on an appropriate assessment of fish resources which, in turn depends on the accuracy and completeness of scientific information. Yet often the appropriateness of the information collected is compromised by economical or technological limitations. Thus, there is a need to explore alternative or complementary approaches that can improve fisheries management. Genetics-based approaches offer the most promising alternatives as they allow the capture of information that cannot be measured otherwise and provide cost-effective alternatives to traditional approaches. Yet, despite this potential, the uptake of genetic methods by the fisheries assessment process in general is not a reality. 
Here we examine the power of genetics to assist fisheries management and conservation focusing on commercial fish species with a range of distributions, having different reproductive behavior, and presenting unique assessment challenges, and on still pristine but with exploitation potential ecosystems such as the deep sea. Genome-wide based information has revealed conservation and management important phenomena such as mismatches between administrative and natural populations, reproductively isolated stock mixing, interspecific hybridization, mislabeling and genetic adaptation; I will discuss the potential impact of these new findings on species conservation. Additionally, we have proven alternative sampling approaches such as environmental DNA as promising avenues for marine conservation as they allow to study marine ecosystems in a non-invasive cost-effective manner; I will discuss the advantages and challenges of this new approach in the next generation marine monitoring era.