Tides & Islands – Day 4 – Scientist in Focus, Dr Glenn Moore , Fishing and DNA Collection

Transcription

My name is Glenn Moore, and I specialise in fish mostly what we're doing is diving and inter-tidal work But by doing that, we miss out on a lot of the pelagic fish, we don't get to see them. So the only way to sample those, is to put a line in and see what we can do.

Another trevally.

A young Giant Trevally.

So we've collected the tissue so we can extract the DNA. And the genetic data that we can gain from the DNA is fabulous, because it's an extra tool that we have in our little collection to try and identify some of these species that are cryptic, that are hard to tell apart from other species.

Whoa! A big barracuda. Want a bit of fin clip?

So here's, here's the little piece of fin clip... Fin sample of barracuda ...pectoral fins... this little sample, that we're jsut putting into a 100% ethanol and that essentially will preserve the DNA that we've got in there, so that when we get back we can extract it.

What we're trying to do is set up the, a bank of tissue, from all these places that are hard to get to or expensive to get to.

We can also use that DNA when we're looking at populations of fish from this area and comparing them to populations from other areas and just see whether there are relationships. So this gives us the really big picture story and we can see connections between reefs, between regions and that to us, as a biologist, that's what's really special about being able to use DNA.