DNA barcodes, the lifesaver for many endangered sea turtles. It sorts species apart from one another letting scientist know exactly what one of the seven species acts like and does. It is the first study using DNA of all species from everywhere in the world. It promises to make advances in the conservation and overall protection of the sea turtles. They face many threats such as; over harvesting, habitat loss, climate change, pollution, disease and other factors. By applying barcodes to the animals it allows for people to follow and know where the animals goods go into market as well as what numbers are trapped in fisheries by catch and stranded ashore.
How do they get the barcodes into the animals?
What does it cost for each animal?
I read the article and in there is says that the DNA bar code extracts the part of the DNA that distinguishes the differences in the turtles. I don’t really understand what purpose this serves though. Can’t you tell the differences in turtles by the way they look? I looked for how much it costs to bar code a sea turtle but I couldn’t find it. I read a few other articles on this process but none of them explained how it was done. Do you think that this could hurt the turtles?
Wow that’s pretty crazy, you would imagine that they would do DNA work way before to figure the animals out. Now that there becoming endangered they seem to be more interested in it. here is another site with some more information that i found interesting http://animals.about.com/b/2009/09/17/dna-barcodes-identify-endangered-sea-turtles.htm