In the spring of 2017, Elliot traveled to the Puget Sound to collect sea stars with Jan Kocian to then house them at the USGS Marrowstone Marine Field Station. We were working with Paul Hershberger, the director of the field station, to conduct disease challenge experiments with two pisaster species, the ochre and pink star, and the mottled star. Disease challenge experiments are critical to studying any disease because it allows scientists to study the disease longitudinally and under a controlled laboratory environment. Previous challenge experiments have been conducted using the sunflower star which led to the hypothesis that a virus is the causative agent of SSWD so we wanted to test this hypothesis in other sea star species. Unfortunately, the experiments did not work which could be due to a number of factors such as host susceptibility or the inoculum used did not contain an adequate dosage of infectious agent. For these reasons and others, we are taking a different direction by attempting to create viral clones

 

 

Publications from this Expedition:

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

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