ABOVE: Marine ecologist Kevin Lafferty filters water in search of great white shark eDNA.
KEVIN LAFFERTY
Several years ago, University of California, Santa Barbara, marine ecologist Kevin Lafferty was confronted with dozens of dying black abalone (Haliotis cracherodii) in his open-water enclosures. He was trying to raise the critically endangered species to test whether any individuals were resistant to the Rickettsiales-like prokaryote (RLP; Candidatus Xenohaliotis californiensis) that had nearly wiped out the black abalone along the southern Pacific coast. With no local populations remaining, Lafferty wondered where the pathogen was coming from.
To solve the mystery, he collected water near the outflow pipe of a farm growing red abalone (H. rufescens)—a species that has been hit less hard by the disease—five miles up the coast from his enclosures, and found that the samples contained the bacterium’s DNA (Front Microbiol, 4:373, 2013). Somehow, red abalone can survive an RLP infection, perhaps thanks ...
