Abstract

Early life history stages of tunas and billfish are difficult to identify based on meristic and morphological characters. Advances in molecular genetics techniques based on the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), have over the last decade provided means to identify (ID) fish larvae using minute amounts of tissue preserved in a variety of ways. Here we present data generated to the forensically ID tuna and billfish larvae from the Gulf of Mexico, and tuna larvae from the Gulf of Guinea, based on nucleotide polymorphisms of the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) control or d-loop region. While other molecular ID techniques, such as PCR-RFLPs and multiplex PCR assays, are faster and more economical to conduct than sequencing, they do not contain the wealth of information stored in sequence data. We illustrate these added benefits of sequencing with studies of tunas and billfish in the areas of population structure, assessments of historical demography and estimates effective population size, molecular systematics, molecular ecology and evolution, and the assessment of reproductive variance and other behavioral correlates

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