Identificação molecular de remanescentes ósseos de cetáceos do período de exploração baleeira da Antártica

Abstract

At the beginning of the 20th century, intense whaling activity took place in Antarctica, whose remains are represented today in the form of ruins and numerous whale bones scattered across the rocky beaches of the South Shetlands. In those years, hundreds of thousands of whales were captured, especially rorquals. Although these historical remains were found exposed for long years to degrading elements, the Antarctic environment provides conditions favorable for the preservation of these bone fragments, with freezing cycles and low temperatures throughout the year. This way, they can still present viable DNA for species’ identification based on molecular analyses. The present study aimed to evaluate the use of Sanger sequencing and the SpInDel methodology, which is based on the analysis of small insertion and deletion regions (InDel), with a focus on identifying species, through the analysis of regions of mitochondrial DNA, of ancient bone fragments dating from the modern whaling period, found throughout Admiralty Bay. Using the proposed methodology, the study performs the first molecular identification of whale bones deposited in Admiralty Bay and it has as innovation product the Antarctic Cetacean Molecular Identification Kit, based on just three insertion regions and deletion of approximately 300 bp within the 16S region and adjacent t-RNAs. Our results corroborate historical hunting records in the vicinity of the region, so that two species of whales known to have been shot during the whaling period could be identified.