As of October 2016, they’ve collected DNA from two-thirds of its fish species-almost all the ones that don’t fall into the “extremely rare” category-and over 200 of the near-1,000 macroinvertebrates. Many of the libraries’ Chesapeake samples were added by Aguilar and the lab as part of the Chesapeake Bay Barcode Initiative, a project to gather DNA from all the Bay’s fish and major invertebrates. The two DNA libraries the team used, called GenBank and the Barcode of Life Database (BOLD), contain DNA sequences for hundreds of thousands of species, including hundreds from the Chesapeake. Barcoding involves extracting a tiny DNA fragment from the digested tissue and looking it up in a DNA library. Podcast: Rob Aguilar talks about using DNA to identify the contents of fish gutsĭNA barcoding offered a way to identify what species the tissues came from. You knew it was a fish, but that was the best you could do.” “You would see maybe some tissue on a spine, some loose tissue, chunks of fish. “Most of the time the fish was fairly well digested, so it was hard to tell exactly what it was,” Aguilar said. In addition to analyzing their stomachs, the Fish & Invertebrate Lab is also tagging blue catfish to track their movements. Rob Aguilar (left) and Paige Roberts perform surgery on a blue catfish. Rob Aguilar would know: A biologist with SERC’s Fish and Invertebrate Lab, he’s spent the last few years dissecting blue catfish stomachs and analyzing their insides. The only way to do that is to look into their stomachs, where the majority of their prey has been reduced to almost-unrecognizable slop. However, to discover how much they could disrupt the ecosystem, marine biologists need to know exactly what they eat. ![]() They quickly developed a reputation as voracious predators, threatening to devour many popular fisheries and edge out the Chesapeake’s native white catfish. Blue catfish arrived in Chesapeake Bay in the 1960s, brought by Virginia managers to establish a fishery. The study, published in the journal Environmental Biology of Fishes, used DNA barcoding to get to the gut of what blue catfish prey on. ![]() They’re also known to gorge themselves on larvae of channel catfish-and, occasionally, juveniles of their own kind. White perch, menhaden and darters: These are just a few favorite foods of Maryland’s invasive blue catfish, according to a new study from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC). Blue catfish SERC biologists dubbed “Megalodon,” which they tracked moving almost 60 miles along the Patuxent River.
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