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.

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Kevin Redd
PhD Candidate
School of Zoology
Marine Research Laboratories
TAFI-University of Tasmania
Private Bag 5
Hobart, Tas 7001

Office: +61 3 6226-1826  Mobile: 041 737 0141