Short abstract:

This communication reports about how seeing-like a vector of microbes enables to consider the ontology of microbial knowledge from an ecology of heterogenous entities from land to lab and lab to epidemiology.

Long abstract:

The Xylella fastidiosa bacterium was discovered in Italy in 2013, where it was responsible for the destruction of thousands of hectares of olive trees. The bacterium is spread from one plant to another by sap-sucking biting insects which, when feeding on a contaminated plant, pick up the bacterium in their mouths and retransmit it to a healthy plant. The study of this bacterium and its insect vectors in Europe is therefore very recent from a biological and epidemiological point of view. Interdisciplinary research, carrying out experiments on the insect vectors of Xylella fastidiosa in ecology as well as laboratory studies, has led to the analysis of the infra-politics of epidemio-surveillance system of this bacterium. Mobility of microbes thanks to vectors is a key challenge for those who – seeing like a state- realize in practices the politics of sustaining plant health. Microbes considered as undesirable because of their impacts on plants are often less considered than the vectors that enable their mobility. Because, scholarship in STS has not much explored laboratory life and scientific practices in relation to biosecurity from an eco-health-perspective, this communication reports about how seeing-like a vector of microbes (meaning a precise ANT description of the translations from insects-in-the-wild to insect-in-barcoding) enables to consider the ontology of microbial knowledge from an ecology of heterogenous entities from land to lab and lab to epidemiology. Questioning the boundary between microbes and plant request to make visible the existence of vectors from an eco-health perspective.