Thirty years of industrial fishing have led to overexploitation of many species, triggering the urgent need
to better assess and manage marine stocks for sustainability. From the very simple definition of stock as
“an exploited fishery unit” to its complex delimitation using ecosystem approaches, genetic approaches
provide a large number of potential markers to unveil the underlying molecular background of complex
biological phenomena in marine species.
The present study is a diagnostic assessment of the number of scientific data published in marine
fisheries using genetic technologies since the onset of NGS up to 2014. This state of the art approach
would allow to derive causalities of real figures and to hypothesize trends in the use and applications of
genetic markers. We first briefly overview pros and cons of current technologies used to delineate fish
stocks and address intrapopulation knowledge deficits identified under an open population paradigm.
Then, in order to assess the advancement of the application of molecular genetic techniques in “fish
stock delineation” we review the work published on spatio-temporal structures of fish stocks. Finally,
the datamining effort is enlarged across marine fisheries during the period 2004–20014 to decipher the
intensity of use of genetic tools per taxa, the main application of each marker type and the trend of use
of classic, modern and new generation techniques in fishery research tasks. Although microsatellites
and mitochondrial DNA-based markers have being used at a growing pace in fishery research tasks until
2011, a time when application of gene sequencing and NGS-derived markers to fishery research has
significantly grown. NGS technologies are underused in fishery science regarding their wide application
in other research fields such as agriculture and aquaculture. So a significant increment of new genetic
marker types is expected to be implemented in the near future. Conversely, application of classic marker
types such as allozymes, AFLPs, whole mitochondrial genomes, RAPDs and RFLPs on mtDNA has been
much less used in the period 2004–2014 following the advent of fast and cheap genotypic screening and
NGS-derived markers. Power gain afforded from the combination of different genetic markers to address
complex processes is lacking in current fishery research since only 21% of the studies over that period
employed two genetic marker types and only 3% employed more than two.
Combinations of methods would allow addressing management issues such as distribution shifts and
population expansion in response to climatic fluctuations and global change, as well as overfishing and
fishery collapse