After returning from travels to Oregon and Seattle, Ian met with Elliot to discuss how the inoculation experiments had proceeded. As a bit of history, the team (and collaborators) had performed the exact same experiments a number of times, and only sometimes is it successful – most recently the experiments performed by Drew Harvell’s group (Morgan Eisenlord) and Colleen Burge in April 2014 at Marrowstone Labs, when nothing was frozen (think: In n Out Burger) – that experiment was reported in the 2014 PNAS paper. But before that in Winter 2014, Colleen, collaborator Ben Miner, and the Team Aquatic Virus has performed unsuccessful inoculation experiments (or ones producing inconsistent results). We’d assumed that the last experiment’s protocol, which uses fresh material (never frozen) and targeting epidermis and tube feet would be successful in a different species (then it was Pycnopodia, now it is Evasterias). After 10 days or incubation, there…