Species-specific detection and quantification of environmental DNA from marine fishes in the Baltic Sea

By S. Knudsen, R. Ebert, M. Hesselsøe, Franziska Kuntke, Jakob Hassingboe, P. B. Mortensen, P. F. Thomsen, E. E. Sigsgaard, B. Hansen, Einar E. Nielsen and 1 more. Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology, 2019

114 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Biomass assesment of fish stocks is a difficult task that often involves costly fisheries trawl surveys. Trawl surveys rarely return replicate samples, as trawling attempts are expensive and difficult to reproduce. Furthermore, traditional benthic trawling is often detrimental to habitats and the organisms associated with the sea bottom. The rapidly developing field of environmental DNA (eDNA) analysis offers a new approach to non-invasive monitoring of fish. In the present study, we develop and test species-specific primers and probes for qPCR detection of eDNA from Atlantic herring (Clupea harengus), Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua), European flounder (Platichthys flesus), European plaice (Pleuronectes platessa), and Atlantic mackerel (Scomber scombrus) in the Baltic Sea. A recently published qPCR system was applied for European eel (Anguilla anguilla). Filtered water samples were collected during a stratified benthic trawl survey, enabling parallel comparisons of eDNA concentrations with biomass caught by trawling. No significant correlation was found between eDNA concentrations and the biomass of fish caught by the trawl, although an association was observed between the measured concentrations of eDNA and the known distributions and main abundances of cod, herring, plaice and flounder. This indicates that while eDNA concentrations may not be directly comparable to results from existing methods – likely because aquatic eDNA concentrations are not controlled by the same combinations of factors as e.g. trawl biomass catch – eDNA analysis could prove a useful supplement for monitoring fish stocks in the future.

Subfields: Ecology, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1d1937ec00e7dadc4bdce0a1521fe60a18d1ba97

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Citations in the corpus

Comparing environmental DNA metabarcoding and underwater visual census to monitor tropical reef fishes (2020, background): “…of marine ecosystems, including species richness (Jerde et al., 2019), seasonal composition variation (Djurhuus et al., 2020), rare species (Weltz et al., 2017), abundance or biomass (Knudsen et al., 2019; Thomsen et al., 2016), and the occurrence of invasive species (Nevers et al., 2018).”
Trawl and eDNA assessment of marine fish diversity, seasonality, and relative abundance in coastal New Jersey, USA (2021, methodology): “79) (Knudsen et al., 2019) and Baltic Sea fish (absent reads-biomass correlation among individual trawls) (Salter et al.”
Environmental DNA (eDNA) as a tool for assessing fish biomass: A review of approaches and future considerations for resource surveys (2021, methodology): “%) of the 63 studies accepted the null hypothesis of no relationship between eDNA and the abundance and/or biomass of focal species (Capo et al., 2019; Deutschmann et al., 2019; Fraija- Fernandez et al., 2020; Hinlo et al., 2018; Knudsen et al., 2019; Perez et al., 2017) (Table 2).”