For this year’s International Day for Mangrove Conservation, we’d like to highlight an important ecosystem service that mangroves provide for coastal communities: its fish biodiversity. Mangrove forests are vital ecosystems for freshwater, brackish, and marine fishes. They serve as nurseries for the juveniles and offer protection from predators through their complex root systems. Many fishing communities depend on mangrove environments to boost their economy. For instance, the municipality of Prieto Diaz, Sorsogon utilizes danggit or rabbitfish (Siganus spp.) in their thriving dried fish industry.
Monitoring fish diversity in mangroves have traditionally been laborious, time-consuming, and expensive. Identifying species using morphological methods have also been a challenge. The PEER ManCoRe team and its collaborators from the University of Ryukyus sought to explore an emerging molecular method, called eDNA metabarcoding, to address these challenges. They found that this tool can assess fish assemblages more rapidly, lessen the bias from traditional survey methods, and increase taxonomic sensitivity to more comprehensively record its biodiversity. The team also observed that the status of mangrove ecosystems could have implications in fish biodiversity, noting that natural mangroves have a higher species count compared to mangrove-recolonized abandoned fishponds. Their results have recently been published in the journal Research Studies in Marine Science with the title: Application of eDNA metabarcoding in the assessment of fish biodiversity in Philippine mangroves: Challenges and opportunities. The paper can be publicly accessed through this link: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rsma.2024.103642
We hope this study could open doors for more eDNA metabarcoding research to benefit Philippine mangrove faunal biodiversity. This year, let’s celebrate not just our mangroves, but the biodiversity that lives within, putting into focus their role in conservation and restoration. As our project leader would say, Patuloy na lumaban, para sa bakhawan!
Mangrove Ecology 