Elliot traveled to the Puget Sound to collect sea stars with Jan Kocian to ship sea stars to Cornell. We have been using these sea stars for disease challenge experiments as well as physiological and microbial observations. We still have many of these sea stars in our tanks today. In addition to collecting sea stars, Elliot searched for sea star larvae in the waters using fine-meshed nets to collect and screen for SSaDV. All of our work to date has been focused on SSaDV in adult sea stars so we were looking for larvae to test whether this life state of the animal also are infected with viruses.

Publications from this Expedition:

Jackson EW, Wilhelm RC, Johnson MR, Lutz HL, Danforth I, Gaydos JK, Hart MW, Hewson I (2020) “Diversity of sea star-associated densoviruses and transcribed endogenized viral elements of densovirus origin” Journal of Virology DOI: 10.1128/JVI.01594-20

Jackson EW, Pepe-Ranney C, Debenport SJ, Buckley DH, Hewson I (2018) “The microbial landscape of sea star and anatomical and interspecies variability of their microbiome” Frontiers in Microbiology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fmicb.2018.01829

Hewson, I, Bistolas, KSI, Quijano Cardé, EM, Button JB, Foster PJ, Flanzenbaum JM, Kocian J, Lewis CK (2018) “Investigating the complex association between viral ecology, environment and North Pacific sea star wasting” Frontiers in Marine Science 5:77

 Jackson EW, Bistolas KSI, Button JBB, Hewson I (2016) “Novel circular single-stranded DNA viruses among an asteroid, echinoid and holothurian (Phylum: Echinodermata)”. PLoS One. DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0166093