Please join us in person as GMGI comes to Gloucester City Hall’s Kyrouz Auditorium! Doors open at 5:30pm, presentation begins at 6pm.

Sustaining fish for the future depends on effective fisheries management today. Fishing regulations are informed primarily by traditional fisheries science techniques designed to understand life history characteristics and relative abundance of populations. Relying only on traditional methods can create data gaps, which have the potential to bias stock assessments and severely impact fish stocks and the fishing communities that depend on them.

At GMGI, we are taking advantage of the recent unprecedented advancement of genomic technology to provide modern high-quality data that can supplement traditional fisheries data and support more sustainable management. We strive to fill critical data gaps using a variety of genomic techniques like environmental DNA, population genetics, and epigenetics to impact regulations and conserve our fisheries.

As we look to the future of fishing in Gloucester, we do so in an age when these technologies are rapidly and continuously evolving to provide us with more robust and detailed information. Incorporating cutting edge genomic techniques like quantitative eDNA metabarcoding and close-kin mark-recapture into stock assessments has the potential to change the way fish stocks are monitored and evaluated, but strongly depends on high quality science, collaboration, and effective communication.

Join us as we hear from Tim O’Donnell, Fisheries Research Scientist at GMGI, and learn how genomic technology can support sustainable fisheries for the future.

Tim’s talk will demystify language you will leave with a better understanding of, including:

• Environmental DNA (eDNA): organismal DNA that can be sampled in the environment (such as sediment and seawater), without directly sampling the individual organism.
• eDNA metabarcoding: a sequencing technique used to assess the biodiversity of a sample by providing the species composition of a group of organisms.
• Population genetics: the study of the genetic composition of populations, including distributions and changes in genotypes over time and geographic space.
• Epigenetics: the study of processes that alters gene activity without changing the DNA sequence itself.
• Close-kin mark-recapture: a technique using genetic relatedness to estimate the true census size of a population.

You can also view this presentation via Livestream through our partners at 1623! Livestream link to come.