A Texas A&M University geneticist will test whether red drum populations are genetically linked to specific bays or estuaries along the U.S. Gulf of Mexico Coast, which could possibly increase the profitability of fish farming and streamline governmental permitting processes.
John Gold, Regents Professor in the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences, has received a $218,000 grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Sea Grant Program Office to use recent advances in technology that should show the extent of the genetic differences between populations of red drum living in different bays and estuaries.
Previous technology showed there are genetic differences between red drum living along the upper and lower Texas coast and “strongly suggested that there are differences in stocks between individual bays and estuaries, but this technology was not sufficiently robust to determine this unequivocally,” Gold said. “New technology allows us to look at the red drum genome in much greater detail and answer the question as to whether there are localized genetic adaptations.”
