ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We thank Giuseppe Sciancalepore of the Dept. of Comparative Biomedicine
and Food Science of the University of Padova for providing the monk seal
archival sample from the Mediterranean marine mammal tissue bank
(www.marinemammals.eu). We
are grateful to Corsica and Sardinia Ferries, in the person of Cristina
Pizzutti, for welcoming our proposal of attempting eDNA sampling from
their fleet, thanks to the brokerage of Dr Antonella Arcangeli of ISPRA
who set up the FLT network within which our protocol was firstly
proposed. Thanks to rangers from the IFCN for the samples collection off
Desertas Islands, to Moby Diving for giving support in sample collection
off Lampedusa, and Franco D’Urso of the KRCA for promptly supplying
BiBSS to Madeira’s team. Thanks to Gruppo Foca Monaca APS - Rome- and
Grupa Sredozemna Medvjedica - Zagabira- for providing the biological
residues samples from their archives and the data on occasional
observations of the last decades.Thank also to University of Bicocca
Marine Science past and current master students Roberto Lombardi, Sofia
Frappi, Simone Innocente and Francesca Gagliardi for lending aliquots of
the samples collected for their theses used to test the assays proposed
in this study. Finally, we would like to publicly thank all the
supporters of our “MeD for Med” (“Marine eDNA for the
Mediterranean”) crowdfunding project, who enthusiastically believed in
our initiative despite the fundraising campaign was launched during
COVID pandemic, restricting our sampling design.