Author(s): Ayumu Sakurada; Satoquo Seino; Mitsuhiro Aizu-Hirano; Tetsuya Sado; Masaki Miya
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Abstract: Tsushima City has been working to establish a marine protected area (MPA) and promote the use of sustainable marine products. For this, it is important to understand the status of fish fauna in the area, but conventional surveys such as visual inspection and capture require a significant amount of labor and special skills. An environmental DNA (eDNA) approach has been developed to serve the same purpose as traditional methods. eDNA analysis can also be used to show the condition of coastal areas if fish fauna detected by this method can be shown to have a correlation with the marine environment. In this study, we surveyed fish fauna along the coast of Tsushima using metabarcoding of eDNA, and then examined the relationship between fish and the submarine topography by using geographical information systems (GIS). Water samples were collected on 25and 26 October 2016 in six study areas. We then analyzed eDNA in the environmental samples using a MiSeq (Illumina) Next Generation Sequencer, and used GIS to find correlations between fish and the submarine topography. The marine geology and sea-bottom slope were classified into several types in each area. As for results, we detected 178 operational taxonomical units (OTUs) of fish using metabarcoding of DNA. A previous study (September 2014 to February 2015) found only 64 species, so the current study demonstrated that the eDNA method can be useful for biological monitoring. Our study found a very strong correlation (R =0.751, p< 0.05) between the percentage of sand and mud area and the percentage of OTUs of fish that live near a sandy or muddy bottom, but we could not show a correlation between fish and the sea-bottom slope. In conclusion, our study showed that an eDNA approach to study fish fauna can be useful for biological monitoring and for understanding the marine environment.
Year: 2018