Dr Joseph DiBattista1, Professor Michael Berumen2, Dr Mark Priest3, Dr Maarten De Brauwer4, Dr Darren Coker2, Tane Sinclair-Taylor2, Amanda Hay1, Dr Gerd Bruss5, Dr Shawky Mansour5, Professor Michael Bunce6, Dr Christopher Goatley7, Matthew Power8, Assistant Professor Alyssa Marshell5
1Australian Museum, Sydney, Australia, 2King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal, Saudi Arabia, 3Five Oceans Environmental Services LLC, Muscat, Sultanate of Oman, 4CSIRO Coasts and Ocean Research Program, Hobart, Australia, 5Sultan Qaboos University, Muscat, Sultanate of Oman, 6Environmental Protection Authority, Wellington, New Zealand, 7University of New England, Armidale, Australia, 8Curtin University, Bentley, Australia
Environmental DNA (eDNA) is increasingly being used to assess community composition in marine ecosystems. Applying eDNA approaches across broad spatial scales now provide the potential to inform biogeographic analyses. However, to date, few studies have employed this technique to assess broad biogeographic patterns across multiple taxonomic groups. Here, we compare eDNA-derived communities of bony fishes and invertebrates, including corals and sponges, from 15 locations spanning the entire length of the Omani coast. This survey includes a variety of habitats, including coral and rocky reefs, and covers three distinct marine ecoregions. Our data support a known biogeographic break in fish communities between the north and the south of Oman; however, the eDNA data highlight that this faunal break is mostly reflected in schooling baitfish species (e.g. sardines and anchovies), whereas reef-associated fish communities appear more homogeneous along this coastline. Furthermore, our data provide indications that these biogeographic breaks also affect invertebrate communities, which includes corals, sponges, and broader eukaryotic groups. The observed community shifts were correlated with local environmental and anthropogenic differences characteristic of this coastline, particularly for the eDNA-derived bony fish communities. Overall, this study provides compelling support that eDNA sequencing and associated analyses may serve as powerful tools to detect community differences across biogeographic breaks and ecoregions. Moreover, we highlight how these advances might be incorporated into marine monitoring, capacity building, and can shape the building of regional DNA reference libraries.
Biography:
Dr Joseph DiBattista is a NSW Senior Research Scientist and Curator of Fishes at the Australian Museum in Sydney, Australia. He holds a PhD from McGill University in Montreal, Canada, completed an NSERC postdoctoral fellowship at the Hawai’i Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB), a postdoctoral position at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia, and an Early Career Research Fellowship at Curtin University in Perth. During this time, he has organized and/or participated in over 60 research trips, starting in the Western Atlantic Ocean and more recently moving into the Indo-West Pacific. His current research is focused on understanding the origins of reef fish biodiversity and how it is maintained using a combination of traditional and next-generation sequencing approaches. He is particularly interested in exploring new ways to track monitor and monitor environmental shifts in our oceans with environmental DNA (eDNA), with a focus on the fish fauna, their diet, and microbiome as biological indicators.