This tutorial walked through the basic steps of molecular phylogenetics: from pulling fish out of the Gulf of Mexico, to extracting DNA, aligning COI sequences, and building trees with three different methods. The result shows us which Gulf species are related, which ones share recent common ancestors, and which ones are predicted to share the same water. Evolutionary history turns matters for everything from fisheries management to conservation planning. A short stretch of mitochondrial DNA, can answer questions that decades of looking at scales and fins could not.
