ArticlePloS one2014
Using environmental DNA to census marine fishes in a large mesocosm.
Article in PloS one, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 103 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
103 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 527 citations in OpenAlex.
- Meta-analysis shows both congruence and complementarity of DNA and eDNA metabarcoding to traditional methods for biological community assessment.Molecular ecology · 2022Pooled it
- Umbilical Cord: A Non-Invasive DNA Source for Sea Turtle Genomics.Molecular ecology resources · 2026Article
- Trends in Aquatic Environmental DNA Research in Alaska.Ecology and evolution · 2026Review
- MitoNGS: an online platform to analyze fish metabarcoding data in high resolution.Molecular biology and evolution · 2026Article
- Evaluating Prey Availability for the Rice's Whale (Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Spatial Heterogeneity and Methodological Insights in Fish Community Assessment: A Case Study in Hulun Lake.Biology · 2025Article
- Review
- Hydrological Connectivity Enhances Fish Biodiversity in Amazonian Mining Ponds: Insights From eDNA and Traditional Sampling.Molecular ecology · 2025Article
- The Long and the Short of It: Nanopore-Based eDNA Metabarcoding of Marine Vertebrates Works; Sensitivity and Species-Level Assignment Depend on Amplicon Lengths.Molecular ecology resources · 2025Article
- A Faroese perspective on decoding life for sustainable use of nature and protection of biodiversity.npj biodiversity · 2024Review
- Fish diversity assessment through conventional morphological identification and recent advances in Saudi Arabia: A review.Veterinary world · 2024Review
- Multi-method survey rediscovers critically endangered species and strengthens Madagascar's freshwater fish conservation.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Article
- Article
- Article
- Modelling environmental DNA transport in rivers reveals highly resolved spatio-temporal biodiversity patterns.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Non-destructive collection and metabarcoding of arthropod environmental DNA remained on a terrestrial plant.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Evaluating the sampling effort for the metabarcoding-based detection of fish environmental DNA in the open ocean.Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Integrating environmental DNA monitoring to inform eel (Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Article
43 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The ocean is a soup of its resident species' genetic material, cast off in the forms of metabolic waste, shed skin cells, or damaged tissue. Sampling this environmental DNA (eDNA) is a potentially powerful means of assessing whole biological communities, a significant advance over the manual methods of environmental sampling that have historically dominated marine ecology and related fields. Here, we estimate the vertebrate fauna in a 4.5-million-liter mesocosm aquarium tank at the Monterey Bay Aquarium of known species composition by sequencing the eDNA from its constituent seawater. We find that it is generally possible to detect mitochondrial DNA of bony fishes sufficient to identify organisms to taxonomic family- or genus-level using a 106 bp fragment of the 12S ribosomal gene. Within bony fishes, we observe a low false-negative detection rate, although we did not detect the cartilaginous fishes or sea turtles present with this fragment. We find that the rank abundance of recovered eDNA sequences correlates with the abundance of corresponding species' biomass in the mesocosm, but the data in hand do not allow us to develop a quantitative relationship between biomass and eDNA abundance. Finally, we find a low false-positive rate for detection of exogenous eDNA, and we were able to diagnose non-native species' tissue in the food used to maintain the mesocosm, underscoring the sensitivity of eDNA as a technique for community-level ecological surveys. We conclude that eDNA has substantial potential to become a core tool for environmental monitoring, but that a variety of challenges remain before reliable quantitative assessments of ecological communities in the field become possible.
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