Results presented in this research were partially funded by the NGO Hivos (Ecuador), the Subsecretaría de Acuacultura—MAGAP (Contract number N°SA-010 -2014) and Concepto Azul (Ecuador) and the Programa de Ciencia y Tecnología de la Presidencia del Consejo de Ministros—FINCyT through an assignment (Contract number N°71-FINCYT-PITEI-2010) along with private funds from MEDA, Marinazul, Inversiones Silma, and Incabiotec (Peru). B.D. was supported by a schol‐arship from the Franco Peruvian School of Life Sciences and K.P. by FONDECYT (CONVENIO DE GESTIÓN N° 015-2013). We are grate‐ful to CIENCIACTIVA-CONCYTEC for its support through a Molecular Biotechnology Master Program scholarship to K.P. We thank Saverio Vicario for his valuable criticism on an early version of this paper. The authors take the opportunity to express their respect to each of the concheros and concheras of Co...

The pustulose ark, Anadara tuberculosa, is considered as an emblematic species of the east Pacific mangrove ecosystem. The decline of its populations is of increasing preoccupation, in particular in Peru. The use of hatchery-produced larvae for stock enhancement or aquaculture is attractive but raises strong criticisms from an ecological point of view, as it could conduce to loss of genetic diversity in wild populations and favor the disease spreading from hatcheries to the environment. In this works, spat production through traditional aquaculture/biotechnology technologies was associated with pathogen molecular diagnostics and with genetic diversity estimation to produce specific pathogen-free (SPF) larvae from genetically characterized populations. All PCR and nested-PCR diagnostics of common bivalve pathogens, such as Bonamia, Martelia, Perkinsus and OsHV1, led to negative results fo...

Biofilms strongly influence bivalve settlement patterns on artificial substrates; however, their structure and taxonomic composition remains a black box. We characterized a natural biofilm composition that exhibits a large settlement of larvae of the Peruvian scallop Argopecten purpuratus by culture-dependent and culture-independent methods. Thirty-two different strains, representing six genera (10 strains of Bacillus, 9 of Vibrio, 6 Acinetobacter, 4 Staphylococcus, 2 Photobacterium, and 1 Exiguobacterium) were isolated. Those strains represented only 1.09% of the relative abundance compared with the total microbiota obtained by 16S rRNA high-throughput sequencing. The metagenomic analysis identified 441 species. Prokaryotes were predominant (93.4%) over eukaryotes (6.6%), with Pelobacter (13.4%), Lewinella (5.6%), Marinobacter (5.4%), Hoeflea (4.2%), and Microcystis (3.1%) being the mos...