Objective
The aim of this proposal is to improve understanding of the variability in distribution, abundance, and biological characteristics of economically important cephalopod stocks of EU waters of the Northeast Atlantic and Mediterranean.
Specific objectives are:
1. To develop a GIS system for cephalopod fisheries in European waters and to integrate fishery, survey, and environmental data at appropriate temporal and spatial scales.
2. To refine the quantitative description of seasonal and inter-annual patterns of distribution and abundance of fished cephalopods and to develop models to predict their abundance from biotic and physical oceanographic parameters.
3. To use microsatellite DNA variation as an indicator of stock structure and interactions of neritic and oceanic cephalopod resources through the use of DNA marker "tags", supplemented with allozyme and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) studies.
4. To integrate the new environmental and genetic approaches with recent findings on biological variability in the European cephalopod populations of the north east Atlantic and Mediterranean to evaluate whether this variation is due to plasticity of responses to environmental conditions or due to underlying genetic variation.
METHODOLOGY AND RESEARCH TASKS
This project is still in its 1st year and progress has not yet been evaluated at full project co-ordination meetings. Consequently further details are given here of the proposed methodology and research tasks.
Task 1. Environmental Variation
To investigate the relationships between environmental conditions and the distribution and abundance of fished cephalopods of the Northeast Atlantic, Mediterranean and Saharan Bank by means of the development of GIS together with related statistical analysis and modelling work. The main cephalopod categories of interest will be the fished species of long-finned squids (Loliginidae), short-finned squids (Ommastrephidae), cuttlefish and octopuses. Information will be compiled on at least two spatial scales: firstly, in low-resolution GIS for the entire northeast Atlantic, Mediterranean and Saharan Bank fishery areas and, secondly, high-resolution GIS for selected sub- areas where detailed information on cephalopods is available.
Oceanographic, hydrographic and climatological data on appropriate temporal and spatial scales from a variety of sources, including remotely sensed data and outputs from models of air and water circulation, will be assembled with fishery landings and research cruise data for cephalopods. These data sources will be integrated into a Geographic Information System (GIS). The GIS to be developed will necessarily operate at more than one spatial scale. For those areas where detailed fishery and/or survey data are available on the fished cephalopod resources (e.g. UK and French coastal waters, Spanish and Portuguese coastal waters, the Aegean Sea), high-resolution GIS systems will be established. Lower resolution, large-area systems will cover the NE Atlantic, Mediterranean and Saharan Bank areas as a whole. The differing biology and mobility of different cephalopod species, e.g. the relatively immobile cuttlefish and octopus as compared to highly mobile squids, will also necessitate different spatial and temporal resolution for the analysis.
Task 2. Genetic variation
The detailed objectives of this task are:
1. To develop a suite of DNA markers for commercially important cephalopod species in EU waters.
2. To use these markers to study the population structure of these species throughout their range. (In the case of some target species, this may involve extending somewhat beyond EU waters.
3. To compare patterns of genetic variation in the different species in relation to differing life history characteristics e.g. benthic/fixed or pelagic/mobile spawning.
4. Dependant on the success of marker development and findings on population structure - to address particular questions of management interest e.g. cryptic speciation, migration.
The source of DNA will be gills and possibly other tissues preserved in alcohol. The main markers involved will be microsatellites. We will attempt to isolate tri and tetra nucleotides to avoid sub-banding problems that are evident with the more commonly used and abundant dinucleotide. Modern enrichment methods will be utilised to achieve this. We will attempt to maximise throughput of samples by using automation (automatic sequencers etc). Depending on progress to have five or more variable micro loci utilisable in each species, then other markers such as mtDNA, PCRable minisatellites and transcribed sequences, may be investigated, since each have specific advantages in stock discrimination.
Task 3. Biological variation
To describe biological variation in fished cephalopods with respect to life cycle parameters such as age, growth and reproduction a limited programme of biological data collection will be undertaken.
New uses will be made of the extensive existing data sets for loliginids, and more restricted information for cuttlefish and some ommastrephid species. There will be limited new sampling for these species and for Octopus throughout the range of the study from which information on population structure, growth and reproduction will be collected. Improved methodology for the direct estimation of age from statoliths will be developed and applied to representative population samples.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- agricultural sciences agriculture, forestry, and fisheries fisheries
- natural sciences earth and related environmental sciences physical geography cartography geographic information systems
- natural sciences biological sciences genetics DNA
- natural sciences chemical sciences organic chemistry alcohols
- natural sciences biological sciences genetics nucleotides
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Coordinator
AB9 2TN Aberdeen
United Kingdom
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