Sailing crew aboard the Holcim taking in a sunrise.
Georgia Schofield | polaRYSE / Holcim - PRB (Source: 14_02_230211_GES_HOLCIM_A747554)
The ocean is the largest but least understood biosphere on Earth. It connects all continents and the poles, channels nutrients across the globe, feeds millions of people and soaks up excess heat and carbon. But its biodiversity is at risk of disappearing before we even know it.
“There’s an urgency to understand biodiversity in the ocean and how climate change is affecting it,” says Xavier Pochon, the science lead at Citizens of the Sea, a New Zealand-based charity cofounded by the Cawthron Institute and New Zealand Geographic in 2024. “We have amazing models that predict future impacts of climate change, but they don’t contain near-real-time biological data collected at sea. There’s a need to gather more data in remote places.”
Environmental DNA technology has been a game changer in the quest to accelerate the exploration and description of marine ecosystems in some of the most inaccessible parts of the ocean.
Traditional oceanographic research relies on direct sightings or even physical capture of species, but each drop of water teems with genetic signatures of marine life, from invisible microbes and phytoplankton all the way to the largest marine mammals that pass through several ocean basins as part of their migrations. Fragments of DNA in seawater can be read like a species barcode, Pochon explains, tracking the presence of marine plants and animals.
Fragments of DNA in seawater track the presence of marine animals and plants.
Christian Sardet & les Macronauts / Chronique du plancton.
But this cutting-edge eDNA technology is only one part of an innovative approach to ocean science. The other is to deploy yachts as data collectors. Equipped with user-friendly eDNA kits, they can gather samples along their sailing route and begin to build a more comprehensive picture of how life in the ocean is changing.
Pochon received an enthusiastic response from sport sailors who scour the southwest Pacific during regular rallies to help map biodiversity. But more recently he’s also set up eDNA sampling kits on some of the world’s fastest racing yachts taking part in extreme endurance races.
With newly confirmed ongoing commitment from the Vendée Globe Foundation, an endowment fund for oceanographic research established in connection with the Vendée Globe, a famous single-handed, non-stop, non-assisted round-the-world sailing race, Pochon hopes to expand the project to more boats to help tell the story of a changing ocean.
Yachts taking part in endurance races reach some of the most remote areas of the ocean.
Sailing Energy / The Ocean Race (Source: 14_06_230613_TOR_JOF_11472)
The connection with extreme endurance sailing began in 2021 with Fabrice Amedeo, who was already using autonomous systems to collect data on salinity, temperature, carbon dioxide and dissolved oxygen en route his fast-paced solo and team races.
As a former journalist with a passion for the ocean, Amedeo recalls that he decided to combine the adventure of sailing with a commitment to conservation. He didn’t need much convincing to add a prototype of the eDNA collection kit to his sampling protocol.
A year later, he set off on the Route du Rhum race across 3542 nautical miles from Saint-Malo, France, to Point-à-Pitre in the Caribbean.
Racing yachts act as ships of opportunity, collecting data enroute.
Amory Ross / 11th Hour Racing / The Ocean Race (Source: 14_07_230627_AMR_11HRT_0179)
It wasn’t meant to be. Four days into the race, an explosion damaged his yacht and all electronics failed. After another explosion two days later, Amedeo could only watch his yacht from a life raft as it sank to the bottom of the ocean with all equipment on board.
But this didn’t deter him — neither from extreme solo racing nor from collecting scientific samples along the way. In 2024, he sailed around the world as part of the Vendée Globe — one of only a hundred skippers worldwide to complete the challenging solo race — while also collecting eDNA samples across all latitudes and from all ocean basins. In November, he will again carry the latest version of the eDNA kit during the Route du Rhum 2026, the race which cost him his boat and nearly his life.
Amedeo sees his racing yacht as a ship of opportunity.
“It is not a research vessel,” he says; “it is a racing boat that travels routes that research vessels do not, and it offers scientists the opportunity to collect unprecedented data on the state of our oceans.”
He notes scientific investment requires hard work, but it is also fascinating. “Today, I find it difficult to separate my job as a sailor from this commitment. And in difficult moments, because there are some, I tell myself that I can’t give up because scientists are counting on me. I’m on a mission and, ultimately, this project gives me a lot of energy.”
The Ocean Race teams are all required to participate in a science programme.
Amory Ross / 11th Hour Racing / The Ocean Race (Source: 14_03_230329_AMR_11HRT_0723)
Stefan Raimund, the principal ocean science advisor at The Ocean Race, has a similar vision. This grueling six-month, around-the-world race already requires all teams to participate in a science program, and competitors are collecting a suite of environmental data, including physico-chemical measurements and microplastics.
During the race in 2023, one team, the 11th Hour Racing Team from the U.S., was keen to use the eDNA kit during a leg of the race that covered a broad range of latitudes and sea surface temperatures, Raimund explains. The team not only returned with a wealth of data, it also won the race and enjoyed even more media attention because of the added focus on science.
This put to rest concerns that data collection would distract sailors from racing. Here was proof that racing boats could collect scientific samples without sacrificing speed, Pochon says.
Innovation continues on the technology and design of eDNA kits.
Supplied by Xavier Pochon
Raimund notes the initial interest was in tracking carbon dioxide in the Southern Ocean, because this part of the global ocean is so under-sampled.
“But since then, there’s been a shift in thinking in the ocean racing community," Raimund says. "Many sailors are now interested and ask questions about the state of the ocean and that’s why it’s nice to have eDNA on board, because it’s much more compelling to explain changes in biodiversity than explaining changes in carbon dioxide concentrations.”
Endurance sailors have traveled with eDNA kits during The Ocean Race in 2023 and again on The Ocean Race Europe in 2025. Raimund says the initiative has since expanded across the sailing community and will be part of the science program when The Ocean Race returns in 2027, then potentially on multiple yachts.
During the 2024 Vendée Globe race alone, Amedeo collected samples during 114 days and produced millions of DNA sequence read-outs across a map that spans all latitudes and longitudes.
“From this, we identified approximately 4,000 taxa, from microbes to whales,” Pochon notes. “And a lot of it is genetically unknown. For many of these genetic signatures we detected, we have no species name, we have no genus. This is especially so around the Southern Ocean, which is a really understudied and difficult to reach area.”
The biological wealth the team found in the traces of DNA was astonishing. Among the many discoveries were flying fish, deep-sea lancetfish famed for their bioluminescence and an elusive moray eel that migrates thousands of miles to spawn along routes that remain a mystery.
The speed at which eDNA samples can be sequenced continues to accelerate, and thanks to genomics companies such as Illumina, the project has ongoing capacity to continue analyzing samples. With help from the Minderoo Foundation, Pochon is also working on interactive dashboards to turn the data into informative displays for the general public.
Felix, Roofus, and Lily from the SV Jadamama crew, sampling eDNA for Citizens of the Sea.
Liz Powell
The foundation has been instrumental in bringing different ocean initiatives together to make sure data collection is comparable and sharable. “Right now, it’s the time to bring all the different data sets together,” Pochon says. “If we can increase the fleet, this will be super powerful.”
Already, the data collected as part of the Citizens of the Sea initiative feed into the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, which provides the International Union for Conservation of Nature (the keepers of the red list of threatened species) with information about the distribution of rare and endangered marine life.
But Pochon stresses the potential goes far beyond a species list to describing ecological changes over time, tracking range shifts, incursions of invasive species and toxic algal blooms.
The Kailua crew collecting eDNA samples during a passage from New Zealand to Fiji as part of the Pacific Rally.
James Frankham
Meanwhile, the technical innovation never stops. The New Zealand based company Sequench continues to improve the sampling kit, both for yachting rallies, which usually tow a torpedo-like device behind the boat, and for racing yachts, which need an integrated device that is easy to handle, lightweight, robust and at the same time, very precise.
The latest eDNA instrument works well for the IMOCA class boats used in round-the-world races, Pochon says. “We can pump water continuously, even at high speeds, thanks to two water inlets built into the keel.”
But the team is also testing the suitability of eDNA sampling on other boat types, including the maxi-trimaran used by the Sails of Change sailing team. Committed to the protection and restoration of biodiversity, the team is exploring eDNA sampling as part of a broader program aimed at developing innovative solutions to reduce risks to marine mammals in offshore racing.
Collecting eDNA from a catamaran proved a challenge, but Pochon explains this only highlights the need for engineering ingenuity to continue adapting the system to different boat configurations in the future.
Pochon hopes the data collected by yachts can be used to show the world how climate change is affecting ocean biodiversity and encourage governments to make more effective plans to forestall its collapse. With thousands of boats plying the ocean all around the world, he hopes to equip more vessels with portable, simple tools as the technology continues to improve toward smaller, faster and hands-free devices.
Amedeo is already looking toward the next Vendée Globe in 2028. “I would like to sail again without using fossil fuels, which I already managed to do during the last round-the-world race. I would also like to contribute to science once again ... and sail on a more efficient boat to prove that investing in ecology and science is not incompatible with performance.”
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