Marine Biodiversity of Southern Sydney Harbour's Journal

Just a friendly reminder that there is only 2 weeks left in our Marine Biodiversity of Southern Sydney Harbour photo submission contest. And so please do get your photos in on iNaturalist online to be considered for the grand prizes that include gift vouchers from local dive providers (Sydney Dive Charters, Dive Centre Bondi, PRO DIVE ALexandria) and restaurants (Clove Lane, Randwick). Note that we will be rewarding highly active users submitting archival photos (photos taken prior to June 1, 2022) and new photos (photos taken between October 15, 2022 and August 1, 2023) from both Parsley Bay and Camp Cove.

This journal post was written by project leader and iNaturalist member, Dr Joseph DiBattista.

Given that we have completed 11 months of seawater sampling at Parsley Bay (Vaucluse) and Camp Cove (Watsons Bay) for the Marine Biodiversity of Southern Sydney Harbour project, I thought that I would share our updated biodiversity audit results based on environmental DNA (or eDNA) technologies. As mentioned previously, eDNA can be thought of as genetic “breadcrumbs” left behind in the environment that can identify every living thing, from microbes to mammals. This was all thanks to DNA sequencing provided by our friends at Wilderlab in New Zealand (https://www.wilderlab.co.nz/). Feel free to look through the "explore" tab on their webpage to view our sampling data populated on their map. Also feel free to view all the amazing flora and fauna that were detected at each of these locations.

Based on the “Wheels of Life” links provided above for Parsley Bay and Camp Cove, we detected 120 and 136 species of fish (with approximately 68% faunal overlap), respectively, with a number cryptic of species detections as well as detections of commercially important species. These detections were in addition to hundreds of species of molluscs, worms, crustaceans, rotifers, cnidarians, fungi, sponges, insects, plants, algae, diatoms, ciliates, birds, common dolphins, humpback whale, bacteria, and a penguin!

This journal post was written by project leader and iNaturalist member, joseph_dibattista Dr Joseph DiBattista.