Species Identification of Stranded Cetaceans in Indonesia Revealed by Molecular Technique

Abstract

Stranding cases of cetaceans in Indonesia including whales, dolphins, and porpoises have recently increasingly become unfold and handled by many people. According to data from Whale Stranding Indonesia (WSI), there have been 40 stranding cases in different parts of Indonesia from early 2016 until February 2017. One of the major obstacles for the people who are handling strandings is to identify the species based on morphology alone when the body is in an advanced stadium of decomposition. WSI recorded that 21% of the species are unidentifiable. For that reason, this research aims to introduce a molecular genetics approach for identifying stranded cetaceans. Mitochondrial DNA of the gene control region was amplified using a Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) method. Sequence data were compared with data from the genebank (https://www.ncbi. nlm.nih.gov) through percentage overlap. From the 36 individuals, which have been used in this research, 26 amplified sampels had base lengths varying between 445-490 base pairs. Molecular methods successfully identified 15 species and 13 genus of Cetacea from different localities in Indonesia. This study shows that molecular genetic techniques can be used as a method to identify species of cetaceans, in particular of stranded individual, which are hard to identify morphologically. The molecular data may complete the genetic database and become a reference for research on genetic diversity among marine mammal populations in Indonesia.