Energy audit and carbon footprint in trawl fisheries.

The combustion of fossil fuels is considered a major cause of climate change, which is why the reduction of emissions has become a key goal of the Paris climate agreement. Coherent monitoring of the energy profile of fishing vessels through an energy audit can effectively identify sources of inefficiency, allowing for the deployment of well-informed and cost-efficient remedial interventions. We applied energy audits to a test fleet of ten vessels, representing three typical Mediterranean trawl fisheries: midwater pair trawl, bottom otter trawl, and Rapido beam trawl.

Evidence of stock connectivity, hybridization, and misidentification in white anglerfish supports the need of a genetics-informed fisheries management framework.

Understanding population connectivity within a species as well as potential interactions with its close relatives is crucial to define management units and to derive efficient management actions. However, although genetics can reveal mismatches between biological and management units and other relevant but hidden information such as species misidentification or hybridization, the uptake of genetic methods by the fisheries management process is far from having been consolidated. Here, we have assessed the power of genetics to better understand the population connectivity of white () and its interaction with its sister species, the black anglerfish ().

Author Correction: Gene-associated markers provide tools for tackling illegal fishing and false eco-certification.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Global seafood consumption footprint.

To ensure food security and nutritional quality for a growing world population in the face of climate change, stagnant capture fisheries production, increasing aquaculture production and competition for natural resources, countries must be accountable for what they consume rather than what they produce. To investigate the sustainability of seafood consumption, we propose a methodology to examine the impact of seafood supply chains across national boundaries: the seafood consumption footprint. The seafood consumption footprint is expressed as the biomass of domestic and imported seafood production required to satisfy national seafood consumption, and is estimated using a multi-regional input output model.

Genetic differentiation and phylogeography of Mediterranean-North Eastern Atlantic blue shark (, L. 1758) using mitochondrial DNA: panmixia or complex stock structure?

Background: The blue shark (, Linnaeus 1758) is one of the most abundant epipelagic shark inhabiting all the oceans except the poles, including the Mediterranean Sea, but its genetic structure has not been confirmed at basin and interoceanic distances. Past tagging programs in the Atlantic Ocean failed to find evidence of migration of blue sharks between the Mediterranean and the adjacent Atlantic, despite the extreme vagility of the species. Although the high rate of by-catch in the Mediterranean basin, to date no genetic study on Mediterranean blue shark was carried out, which constitutes a significant knowledge gap, considering that this population is classified as "Critically Endangered", unlike its open-ocean counterpart.

FishTrace: a genetic catalogue of European fishes.

https://fishtrace.jrc.ec.

Novel nuclear barcode regions for the identification of flatfish species.

The development of an efficient seafood traceability framework is crucial for the management of sustainable fisheries and the monitoring of potential substitution fraud across the food chain. Recent studies have shown the potential of DNA barcoding methods in this framework, with most of the efforts focusing on using mitochondrial targets such as the and genes. In this article, we show the identification of novel targets in the nuclear genome, and their associated primers, to be used for the efficient identification of flatfishes of the family.

Harnessing the Power of Genomics to Secure the Future of Seafood.

Best use of scientific knowledge is required to maintain the fundamental role of seafood in human nutrition. While it is acknowledged that genomic-based methods allow the collection of powerful data, their value to inform fisheries management, aquaculture, and biosecurity applications remains underestimated. We review genomic applications of relevance to the sustainable management of seafood resources, illustrate the benefits of, and identify barriers to their integration.

Gene-associated markers provide tools for tackling illegal fishing and false eco-certification.

Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated fishing has had a major role in the overexploitation of global fish populations. In response, international regulations have been imposed and many fisheries have been 'eco-certified' by consumer organizations, but methods for independent control of catch certificates and eco-labels are urgently needed. Here we show that, by using gene-associated single nucleotide polymorphisms, individual marine fish can be assigned back to population of origin with unprecedented high levels of precision.

Toward fish and seafood traceability: anchovy species determination in fish products by molecular markers and support through a public domain database.

Traceability in the fish food sector plays an increasingly important role for consumer protection and confidence building. This is reflected by the introduction of legislation and rules covering traceability on national and international levels. Although traceability through labeling is well established and supported by respective regulations, monitoring and enforcement of these rules are still hampered by the lack of efficient diagnostic tools.

The lambda red proteins promote efficient recombination between diverged sequences: implications for bacteriophage genome mosaicism.

Genome mosaicism in temperate bacterial viruses (bacteriophages) is so great that it obscures their phylogeny at the genome level. However, the precise molecular processes underlying this mosaicism are unknown. Illegitimate recombination has been proposed, but homeologous recombination could also be at play.