Björn Källström, Maritime Museum & Aquarium, Gothenburg, Sweden, gave a lecture on "Towards a new conservation strategy - distributed living gene banks in public and private aquariums". Abstract: Marine species are subjected to many different stressors, including climate change, ocean acidification and over fishing, which threatens natural populations and species with extinction. In order to save species from extinction in the wild conservation projects can include threatened species held in captivity in aquariums as living gene banks. The objective of this project is to use existing private and public aquariums to build distributed repositories for threatened marine species. The species in the repositories will be used to start breeding programs and for research to investigate taxonomy, genetic diversity and resilience to different stressors. The repositories are distributed since they include specimens held in private as well as in public aquariums. An important component in the projects is to gather and document the acquired knowledge from the private aquarist of how to best keep marine species in captivity, including successful culturing and breeding techniques. In order to investigate the feasibility of the distributed repository model we have created an ex-situ, distributed repository of tropical stony corals in Swedish public and private aquariums. We have collected genetic data (nuclear microsatellite data and mitochondrial sequence data) from 30 coral clones of the Birds nest coral, Seriatopora hystrix. The corals in the investigation were provided both by private aquarists as well as by public aquariums in Sweden. The results from the investigations show that there are unexpectedly high genetic diversity in Swedish aquariums measured as clonal diversity and allelic richness. The results also indicates that the Swedish mitochondrial haplotypes are most similar to an “Upper Slope genotypes” growing on medium depths in wild populations of Seriatopora hystrix at the Great Barrier Reef. In order to investigate the resilience of the corals in the repository to ocean acidification a sub sample of the clones were subjected varying levels of pH (7,5 – 8,4) in controlled experiments. The results from the ocean acidification experiments showed a reduced growth with lowered pH-values, indicating that Seriatopora hystrix is sensitive to ocean acidification. In another investigation we used an existing repository of the Small spotted catshark (Scyliorhinus canicula) in public aquariums in Sweden. The sharks in the repository are used in a conservation project aiming at restocking Swedish wild populations. The project suffers from a low number of breeding individuals which potentially results in low genetic diversity in the offspring. Molecular data was collected from sharks from three public aquariums in Sweden and from sharks imported from a research aquarium in France to be eventually included in the breeding program. The sequence data was also compared to published genetic sequences from wild populations. Preliminary results from the study indicate that sharks in the study, from Sweden and France, belong to the same genetic population and that the French sharks potentially can be included in the breeding program in order to increase genetic diversity. FishBase is the world's largest encyclopedia of fish, freely available on the net. The Swedish office every year holds an annual public symposium on a current theme related to fish biology, fish systematics and fish ecology. FishBase Symposium 2015 was held in Stockholm, Monday 19th October, in the Main Auditorium of the Swedish Museum of Natural History, and the theme was CAPTIVATING FISHES (fängslande fiskar), a pun referencing both keeping fishes in captivity, and the captivating, fascinating, nature of fishes. Today science and technology have advanced to the point that it is now possible to keep almost any aquatic organism in recirculating systems. FishBase Sweden invited seven experts to give talks on different aspects of what captive maintenance and breeding has meant for conservation, for food production, and for the aquarium hobby. CC-BY-NC

• published: 04 Nov 2015
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