The King of the Reef!
Tasmania, Australia Kevin Redd and his team work on a project whose goals are to examine the
range of prey consumed by the southern rock lobster (Jasus Edwardsii) and
to further understand the role that this predator has in the marine environment. Redd's team has developed non-lethal techniques to collect
fecal material from live rock lobsters so that their sampling efforts can
be conducted in marine protected areas and in conjunction with commercial
fishing operations.
(The picture shows Kevin at the Tasmanian Aquaculture and Fisheries Institute (TAFI) Crayfish Point Marine Reserve in Taroona, Tasmania.) DNA-based techniques have proven to be very effective in cases where conventional gut content analysis by dissection is not practical or ethically feasible. "The MO BIO Ultra Clean™ Fecal DNA Kit gives the best results for isolating high quality DNA from the collected lobster fecal material and facilitates PCR based prey detection." For his work, Kevin has been using the UltraClean™ Fecal DNA Kit with 50 preps, but he is now moving into a high throughput section of the project, and will utilize UltraClean-htp™ 96 Well Soil DNA Kit to achieve high throughput results. Kevin Redd |