Swimming against the flow-Environmental DNA can detect bull sharks (Carcharhinus leucas) across a dynamic deltaic interface.

ABSTRACT: Human activities in coastal areas are accelerating ecosystem changes at an unprecedented pace, resulting in habitat loss, hydrological modifications, and predatory species declines. Understanding how these changes potentially cascade across marine and freshwater ecosystems requires knowing how mobile euryhaline species link these seemingly disparate systems. As upper trophic level predators, bull sharks (Carcharhinus leucas) play a crucial role in marine and freshwater ecosystem health. Telemetry studies in Mobile Bay, Alabama, suggest that bull sharks extensively use the northern portions of the bay, an estuarine-freshwater interface known as the Mobile-Tensaw Delta. To assess whether bull sharks use freshwater habitats in this region, environmental DNA surveys were conducted durin

SUBMITTER: Drymon JM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7790648 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature