Elliot and Mitch traveled to Ketchikan, Alaska to collect tissues samples from healthy sea star and sea cucumber population to screen for SSaDV. There are very few places in Southeast Alaska to collect echinoderms without having a boat or sea plane and Ketchikan is one of them. We received reports from this area of unhealthy sea cucumbers and took the opportunity to collect samples to test the presence or absence of SSaDV in these populations.

Publications from this Expedition:

Hewson I, Johnson MR, Tibbetts I (2020) “An unconventional flavivirus and other RNA viruses in the sea cucumber (Holothuroidea; Echinodermata) virome” Viruses 12: 1057

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