DNA metabarcoding to assess diet-overlap between planktivorous fish in the pelagic Baltic Sea. undefined

Understanding trophic interactions is crucial to develop management strategies. However, planktivorous fish and zooplankton are often clustered in the same functional groups, hindering the complexity of the basic trophic interactions in aquatic food web. In our project we used the DNA metabarcoding approach on the 18S rRNA, and the COI genes on gut contents of dominant planktivorous fish in the Baltic Sea to resolve the full diet spectrum of these important species at a high taxonomic level. This project submission contains 18S rRNA and COI sequences libraries from the gut contents of adult Sprattus sprattus, Clupea harrengus and Gasterosteus aculeatus and larval stages of Sprattus sprattus and Platichthys flesus collected in the southern Baltic Sea proper in April 2019.