Honeybees and shrimp are the latest species undergoing vaccinations, with what could be big benefits for agriculture and aquaculture. A Georgia-based company, Dalan Animal Health, has begun rolling out what the USDA conditionally cleared three years ago as the first honeybee vaccine in the US—and it's now reporting early lab success with a shrimp version unveiled at April's World Vaccine Congress. Both aim to shield high-value farmed species from devastating diseases while cutting reliance on antibiotics, per Science News.
The science breaks from the traditional vaccination playbook. Invertebrates lack the adaptive immune system that human vaccines tap to produce antibodies, so "to come up with a vaccine for an animal that is not producing these antibodies is literally a paradigm shift," zoological medicine specialist Jörg Mayer tells the AAHA's Trends. What invertebrates do have is an innate immunity that research suggests can form a kind of "memory" via heritable epigenetic changes.
Dalan's bee vaccine, made from killed Paenibacillus larvae bacteria, is fed to queens; their offspring emerge more resistant to American foulbrood and a mite-linked virus. For shrimp, brood stock are fed an inactivated bacterial mix; their young are effectively born pre-armed and in lab tests survived some lethal infections at a 50% higher rate, per Science News. Outside experts want peer-reviewed data and real-world trial results, and Dalan plans field tests in Indonesia that could determine whether invertebrate vaccines move from curiosity to a new agribusiness tool.
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