capture mark recapture with no mark and no recapture [aka 23andmyfish]

A very exciting talk today at NBBC15 here in Reykjavik was delivered by Mark Bravington yesterday on Close-kin mark recapture by modern magic (!). Although Mark is from Australia, being a Hobart resident does qualify him for the Nordic branch of the conference! The exciting idea is to use genetic markers to link catches in a (fish) population as being related as parent-offspring or as siblings. This sounds like science-fantasy when you first hear of it!, but it is actually working better than standard capture-mark-recapture methods for populations of a certain size (so that the chances to find related animals are not the absolute zero!, as, e.g., krill populations). The talk was focussed on bluefin tuna, whose survival is unlikely under the current fishing pressure… Among the advantages, a much more limited impact of the capture on the animal, since only a small amount of genetic material is needed, no tag loss, tag destruction by hunters, or tag impact of the animal survival, no recapture, a unique identification of each animal, and the potential for a detailed amount of information through the genetic record. Ideally, the entire sample could lead to a reconstruction of its genealogy all the way to the common ancestor, a wee bit like what 23andme proposes for humans, but this remains at the science-fantasy level given what is currently know about the fish species genomes.