DNA Barcoding for the Assessment of the Taxonomy and Conservation Status of the Fish Bycatch of the Northern Brazilian Shrimp Trawl Fishery

Aurycéia Guimarães-Costa,Iracilda Sampaio,Tommaso Giarrizzo,José Amorim Reis-Filho,Eglé Miranda Ramos Corrêa,Fabíola S Machado,Rafael Guilherme Araújo,Marcelo Andrade

doi:10.3389/fmars.2020.566021

Aurycéia Guimarães-Costa, Iracilda Sampaio + Show 6 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2020.566021

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Abstract

Trawling is a controversial fishing method due to the perceived lack of selectivity of the net and the resulting capture of a large quantity and diversity of non-target species. Here, we used DNA barcode methods to identify the composition of the bycatch produced by the trawl fishery of the Brazilian North coast. A total of 182 species belonging to 18 orders and 62 families were captured, including 17 species under some degree of threat in the wild according to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species (IUCN). These results highlight the impact on the marine biodiversity of northern Brazil caused by the bycatch of small-scale industrial and unregulated fishery operations, and support the application of DNA-based methods for the identification of the bycatch species taken by data-poor fisheries, as a powerful tool for the improvement of the the quality of fishery catch statistics and more precise bycatch records.

Highlights

Fisheries that trawl for shrimp in tropical regions take an extremely diverse bycatch fauna, but generally provide few historical or biological data for the quantitative assessment of stocks
According to Fricke et al (2020), the composition of the bycatch was dominated by species with a wide geographical distribution: 20 species, including sharks (Carcharhinus falciformis, Carcharhinus leucas, Sphyrna mokarran, and Sphyrna lewini), rays (Aetobatus narinari), and members of the families Carangidae (Selar crumenophthalmus, Seriola rivoliana, and Decapterus tabl), Scombridae (Auxis rochei), Sphyraenidae (Sphyraena barracuda), Exocoetidae (Cheilopogon cyanopterus), Echeneidae (Remora australis and Echeneis naucrates), and Monacanthidae (Aluterus monoceros and Aluterus scriptus) have a circumtropical distribution
57 species identified are distributed throughout the Western Atlantic Ocean, while another 23 species are amphi-Atlantic, including species distributed in the Mediterranean, the Black Sea (Priacanthus arenatus and Caranx crysos), and in the Western Indian Ocean (Kaupichthys hyoproroides)

Summary

Introduction

Fisheries that trawl for shrimp in tropical regions take an extremely diverse bycatch fauna, but generally provide few historical or biological data for the quantitative assessment of stocks. A recent study (Marceniuk et al, 2019) provided the first checklist of the bony fish caught by the industrial shrimp trawling operations off the northern coast of Brazil, many of the species (over 15% of the total diversity) were identified through taxonomic keys and photographs taken by onboard observers with no specimens being collected or deposited in museum collections. These authors overlooked the impact of the trawling operations on the Chondrichthyes, a group of fish that of threatened shark and ray species that are marketed unregulated in Brazil

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