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.