The University of Florida Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience Evenings at Whitney Lecture Series continues at 6 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 15, with the program titled “10 Years of Sea Turtles, Tumors and Florida Wildlife Forensics at the UF Whitney Lab.”
David Duffy, associate professor of wildlife disease genomics, UF Whitney Laboratory, will be the speaker.
This free lecture will be presented in person at the UF Whitney Laboratory Lohman Auditorium, 9505 Ocean Shore Blvd., St. Augustine. Those interested also have the option of registering to watch via Zoom live the night of the lecture.
Register to watch online: https://ufl.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Seg-UKZ8Quune09LB2AcMg
The University of Florida’s Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience Sea Turtle Hospital opened its doors to patients 10 years ago. Since then, sea turtles have continued to face many threats including habitat loss, pollution, plastic ingestion and a tumor disease known as fibropapillomatosis.
This talk will highlight a decade of research efforts to understand and mitigate threats to sea turtle survival. This includes the use of cutting-edge human cancer research approaches to understand the causes of sea turtle tumors, assessing the scale of the plastic ingestion threat and the development of novel environmental (e)DNA technologies to monitor shifts in the occurrence of sea turtles and their pathogens in the wild.
The laboratory has also been utilizing eDNA technologies for biodiversity monitoring, recovering genetic material from thousands of species simultaneously by collecting water, sand or even air samples. These cutting-edge eDNA approaches, pioneered in the Sea Turtle Hospital and Whitney Lab’s rich natural surroundings, with a focus on Florida’s varied animal life (turtles, tortoises, bobcats, spiders, etc.), have had global impact for non-invasive biodiversity and wildlife monitoring, and even human medicine and forensics.
