Metabarcoding gillnets to assess unaccounted catch depredation or escape

Gillnets are the world's most common net-based fishing gear, comprising walls of light mesh designed to entangle fish. often retrieved with holes in netting, which means some animals escape or depredated unseen, but mortality. To effectively manage fisheries around world, information is required on not only harvested and discarded mortalities, also problematic interactions mortalities caused by gear especially those involving protected species. This study sought assess a novel method for determining such sampling five adjacent pieces netting each ten two bather-protection polyethylene gillnets environmental DNA “eDNA”. Here we show that eDNA correctly identified all previously entangled-and-landed Also, from three uncaptured taxa were recorded: bull shark, Carcharhinus leucas, white Carcharodon carcharias dolphins (Delphindae), illustrating potential reveal cryptic gillnet interactions. We propose as scientific methods evolve autonomous real-time surveillance becomes routine, testing gears vessels could provide novel, complementary fishery-monitoring tool.