“…In addition, to capture potential genetic variation, including undocumented cryptic diversity, it is important to sequence an adequate number of individuals from across a species range (Weigt et al 2012b). We have made considerable efforts in the past decade as part of the Indian Census of Marine Life (ICoML) to recover barcodes in reasonable numbers of marine phyla including fin & shell fishes, invertebrates (Khan et al, 2010(Khan et al, , 2011PrasannaKumar et al, 2012;Thirumaraiselvi et al, 2015;Rajthilak et al, 2015;Rahman et al, 2013Rahman et al, , 2019Hemalatha et al, 2016;Palanisamy et al, 2020;Manikantan et al, 2020;Thangaraj et al, 2020) and plants (Sahu et al, 2016;Narra et al, 2020) occurring in and around the Vellar estuary. Hence we predict a high rate of success in identification of dietary items of A. maculatus occurring in this environment.…”