Líffræðifélag Íslands - biologia.is
Líffræðiráðstefnan 2025
Erindi/veggspjald / Talk/poster V63
Höfundar / Authors: Ragnar Blær (1, 2), Haseeb S. Randhawa (1)
Starfsvettvangur / Affiliations: 1. University of Iceland - Faculty of Life and Environmental Sciences, (2) Marine & Freshwater Research Institute
Kynnir / Presenter: Ragnar Blær
Abstract To have a healthy ecosystem, it is the upmost important to manage fisheries in a sustainable way by understanding the workings of our fish stocks and their populations. The Atlantic wolffish (Anarhichas lupus) is one of the more commercially and economically important species of fish in Icelandic waters. In recent years, their populations have declined and new ways of managing them is needed. This study focuses on a neglected method for fish stock identification, which is the use of parasites as biological markers. Parasite communities are tightly knit and genetically distinct for each subpopulation and region of the host. The aim is adding more data on the parasite fauna of A. lupus, which differ highly from the North and South of Iceland, supporting the theory of ecological distance decay of similarity. The overall abundance of the most observed parasites per host was approximately 14.63 nematodes and 42.46 trematodes. As biological tags, they are both a cost-effective method and non-invasive in nature; by combining parasitology and marine biology it will further increase our understanding of the complex structure of fish populations.