August 10, 2022 — DNA sequencing has gotten to be a lot less expensive and that has opened the door for many different uses. It is now relatively cheap to have your own DNA evaluated by services like 23andme or MyHeritage or Ancestry.com. You can learn about your ethnic background and even get connected with relatives you never knew. Sometimes there are surprises. While oral or written family histories are often incomplete or “sanitized,” the DNA record is fully transparent. It is also increasingly possible to learn about potential health risks you may have inherited.
There is an interesting application of DNA sequencing for tracking the “ethnicity” for ocean dwelling fish. Of course in that case it isn’t the fish who want the information – it’s the government agencies around the world who are responsible for managing ocean “fisheries” – the populations of wild fish that make up a significant part of the human food supply of protein and which provide healthy omega-3 fats and important minerals. According to a paper published in 2020 in the journal Nature titled “The Future of Food From the Sea,” humans currently derive 59 million metric tonnes of “food from the sea” of which 84% is from wild caught fisheries, and 16% is from “mariculture” – farmed fish and bivalves. That represents 17% of the global edible meat supply. By 2050 that amount is expected to increase to between 80 and 103 million metric tonnes, mostly through increases in mariculture. Even so, wild caught fish are still expected to provide between 56% and 71% of the 2050 total.
Humans have been harvesting ocean dwelling fish for centuries, and the ecosystems that support those fish are able to maintain a viable population even under a significant degree of human fishing pressure. However, there are historical examples of problematic overfishing such as the population of Atlantic cod that was once abundant off the coast of the US and Canada but which had collapsed by 1992.