Rockefeller University

Program for the Human Environment

News

eDNA of Red Gate Farm waters, Martha’s Vineyard

At the end of August 2020, Jesse Ausubel sampled 7 locations in parts of what will become the new Squibnocket Pond Reservation (Red Gate Farm) in Aquinnah on Martha’s Vineyard for the Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation (SMF), which will manage the property together with the MV Land Bank. The late fall 2020 SMF newsletter runs a good article by Kate Feiffer about the findings, analyzed by Mark Stoeckle, which include a lot of eel and muskrat DNA and a little bit of black-crowned night heron.

Passing of Janusz Kindler

Polish water resources engineer Janusz Kindler passed away on 8 December 2020 in Warsaw at the age of 86. Janusz served as chief of the Resources and Environment group at IIASA during the early 1980s and thus as Jesse Ausubel’s boss. Jesse has written a Remembrance.

Coverage of eDNA & trawl study

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

ABC News “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.”  https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/plenty-fish-sea-scientists-now-count-dna/story?id=74543799 and in French, here, and in German, here

Science Magazine, United States Fisheries in a flask? Loose DNA in seawater offers a new measure of marine populations

Agencia EFE, Spain  El análisis del ADN ambiental permite saber el número de peces de los océanos https://www.infobae.com/america/agencias/2020/12/03/el-analisis-del-adn-ambiental-permite-saber-el-numero-de-peces-de-los-oceanos/

Tencent, Mainland China “New discovery by American scientists: by measuring the DNA in the sea water, you can know how many fish there are in the sea”

COSMOS Magazine, Australia Scientists go fishing for fish DNA-fish-dna/

Anthropocene How many fish are in the sea?

From the Chinese Academy of Sciences / China Science News: New method for marine biological population prediction

Greenreport, Italy Quanti pesci ci sono in mare? Ce lo dice l’eDNA

Seafood Source Cheaper, easier eDNA testing shows similar results to bottom-trawl surveys

Neue Zuricher Zeitung Find what escapes the eye: A new research approach is revolutionizing large parts of biology. Traces of genetic material in the environment provide information about hidden living organisms together with composition of entire species communities, Kurt De Swaaf

Fish abundance survey by eDNA published

The paper Trawl and eDNA assessment of marine fish diversity, seasonality, and relative abundance in coastal New Jersey, USA by Mark Stoeckle, Jason Adolf, Zachary Charlop-Powers, Keith Dunton, Gregory Hinks, and Stacy VanMorter appears today open access in the Journal of Marine Science. A press release summarizes the findings: “Study Proves Bits of DNA in Seawater Correlate to the Weight of Netted Fish; eDNA makes the ocean a sea of biological information.”