Sustainable fisheries management depends on understanding not only how many individuals remain in a population, but also whether populations retain the capacity to recover, adapt and persist under continued exploitation and environmental change. Conventional stock assessments provide essential estimates of abundance and biomass, yet they largely reflect snapshots of population size that can fluctuate substantially with recruitment, environmental variability and sampling uncertainty. As a result, they often provide limited insight into the long-term demographic history and evolutionary resilience that ultimately determine the future sustainability of exploited populations.
Whole-genome sequencing is transforming this perspective. Every genome preserves a historical record of population change, capturing the genetic signatures of expansion, decline, exploitation and recovery accumulated over thousands of generations. By reconstructing these demographic histories, genomic data can estimate population sizes prior to commercial exploitation, quantify the magnitude and timing of harvest-induced declines, reveal recovery following management intervention, and identify the lasting genetic consequences of overexploitation that remain undetected by conventional stock assessments.
This presentation will showcase a series of case studies spanning commercially important fisheries and shark species from Australia to demonstrate how whole-genome sequencing is reshaping our understanding of marine population dynamics. These examples illustrate how genomic data can reveal where populations have come from and where they are headed. Together, they demonstrate how genomes function as evolutionary time machines, complementing traditional fisheries assessments and offering powerful new tools to support sustainable fisheries management and marine conservation.