Photo: Unsplash // Jakob Owens
The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and other government agencies that survey marine life have a lot of different technologies at their disposal for conducting research. You’d imagine the best way for them to learn about animals though would be a tried and trued method of tagging, capturing, and observing them with their own two eyes when possible.
According to a report presented at the U.S. National Conference on Marine Environmental DNA (eDNA) in November, those methods are about to look like the stuff of cavemen. Over the past two decades, scientists have been gaining a deeper understanding of how marine life shed DNA in water. That DNA trail, they’ve learned, dissipates over the next 24 hours. This means the most efficient ways of analyzing a water sample from a river, a stream, or the ocean could tell researchers which animals are swimming nearby.
A new technology for executing this is called the “Go Fish” and it works more or less like a “DNA dip stick” for the ocean. Researchers collect a water sample and the water is analyzed. At present, it takes three days or less to identify species in a sample, costing researchers $15 per sample for one species and another $8 to locate each additional species. But the really unique potential for this tool seems to be in quicker turnaround times.
“If you took a water sample from New York Harbor on Tuesday morning, by the end of day Thursday you’ll know whether winter flounder are back,” said Jesse Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University, told National Geographic last month.
The report presented at the conference in November was mostly focused on helping researchers learn about marine environments with a more efficient and cost-effective method. But Ausubel pointed out that beyond that, in a few years’ time the technology may be advanced enough for lifeguards to take an early morning sample when they arrive at the beach and know by midmorning if tiger sharks or white sharks are in the water nearby.
Barbara Block, a marine scientist at Stanford University told National Geographic she’s already using Go Fish for her research. “Over 1,000 miles from shore we were able, in 48 hours, to identify the presence of white sharks in the water column beneath the ship using nanopore eDNA sequencing at sea.”
