We’re all familiar with blood tests at the doctor’s office. That’s one of the things Andrea Battison does in her lab. Except she does them for lobsters.

“Part of my training as a clinical pathologist is to interpret blood test results and try to discern what kind
of disease process is happening,” explains the research scientist at the AVC’s Lobster Science Centre. “We’re trying to find out if there are measurable indicators in the hemolymph or lobster blood which will be indicative of a certain disease state or damage to a body system.”

She brings a unique skill set to her role. A veterinarian by training, she is also a Board-certified clinical pathologist who did her PhD focusing on different ways to evaluate hemolymph to determine the health status of the lobster.
 
“Up until now, a lot of the work on lobsters has been done by people coming from a biological perspective looking at lobster populations.
I look at how an individual animal responds to a disease state.
Interestingly, one animal will respond a little differently than another, so I’m also looking at what’s different about that individual animal
and what it tells us about a particular disease, infectious agent, or
the lobster itself.”

The first disease Battison looked at is a bacterial disease called gaffkemia. It’s a systemic infection, but it requires a breach of some sort in the lobster’s shell as the pathogen itself has no invasive properties.

“It can be important and usually affects the animals when they are in warm water—often holding areas.”

Another is called “bumper car disease,” which affects the animals in cold water. It’s another systemic infection, this time caused by a
ciliate— “somewhat like a little Paramecium that you might have looked at in your biology lab. The whole idea is to find an indicator of disease early on in the process so that these animals could be diverted for immediate processing rather than trying to put them into long-term holding where they might not survive.”

Lobsters are also prone—mainly in the northeastern US—to shell disease, where the shell becomes eroded and ulcerated. Bacteria on the surface are involved in degrading the shell, but when the lobsters moult, the new shell underneath is unaffected. She notes that there is no viral disease recognized in American lobsters.

“There’s been a lot of work done on the immune system and innate immunity in invertebrates such as shrimp, for example, because of the value of the industry and the fact that shrimp are farmed. But not much has been done on lobsters, which is a wild fishery.

“They are very resilient animals, with an effective immune system. But because they are invertebrates they don’t have a lymphoid system. They can’t make antibodies so you can’t actually vaccinate these animals against diseases the way you could your cat or horse, or yourself.

“The tricky part about lobsters,” she adds, “is that even when they have a lot of bacteria floating around in their blood, they are still walking around and still trying to make some aggressive movements if you threaten them, so it’s hard to tell that they’re sick.”

She continues to evaluate biochemistry profiles as part of lobster health assessments. She is also working on the isolation and identification of antimicrobial peptides. These short proteins are part of the innate immune response in all creatures. Identification of acute phase proteins—proteins whose concentrations increase or decrease in response to inflammation—is another component of the work. “This approach is also used in human medicine to detect problems. It is not very specific but it’s an indicator; it can tell us something is wrong and that this is likely a high-risk animal.

“They actually have very few diseases that we recognize in the adults. The whole market, and industry, involves the mature animal. There is no harvesting of juveniles, so there is little work done on them. But there is an ongoing collector project to see where lobsters are settling. It looks like we’ll have access to these animals to run health checks, so I hope we’ll soon be able to look at some of the younger and juvenile stages.

“The immature lobsters could be affected by some disease process and never get to be adults, but we’d never know it if they die. I think looking at the younger lobster would complete the puzzle.”