A rapid spread of the stony coral tissue loss disease outbreak in the Mexican Caribbean

PeerJ

article

Lorenzo Alvarez-Filip¹  Nuria Estrada-Saldívar¹  Esmeralda Pérez-Cervantes¹  Ana Molina-Hernández¹  Francisco J. González-Barrios¹ 

[1] Biodiversity and Reef Conservation Laboratory, Unidad Académica de Sistemas Arrecifales, Instituto de Ciencias del Mar y Limnología, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

关键词: White plague;    Coral mortality;    Disease prevalence;    Reef monitoring;    Long-term data;    Reef functioning;    White syndrome;    SCTLD;   

DOI  :  10.7717/peerj.8069

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Inra

【 摘 要 】

Caribbean reef corals have experienced unprecedented declines from climate change, anthropogenic stressors and infectious diseases in recent decades. Since 2014, a highly lethal, new disease, called stony coral tissue loss disease, has impacted many reef-coral species in Florida. During the summer of 2018, we noticed an anomalously high disease prevalence affecting different coral species in the northern portion of the Mexican Caribbean. We assessed the severity of this outbreak in 2018/2019 using the AGRRA coral protocol to survey 82 reef sites across the Mexican Caribbean. Then, using a subset of 14 sites, we detailed information from before the outbreak (2016/2017) to explore the consequences of the disease on the condition and composition of coral communities. Our findings show that the disease outbreak has already spread across the entire region by affecting similar species (with similar disease patterns) to those previously described for Florida. However, we observed a great variability in prevalence and tissue mortality that was not attributable to any geographical gradient. Using long-term data, we determined that there is no evidence of such high coral disease prevalence anywhere in the region before 2018, which suggests that the entire Mexican Caribbean was afflicted by the disease within a few months. The analysis of sites that contained pre-outbreak information showed that this event considerably increased coral mortality and severely changed the structure of coral communities in the region. Given the high prevalence and lethality of this disease, and the high number of susceptible species, we encourage reef researchers, managers and stakeholders across the Western Atlantic to accord it the highest priority for the near future.

【 授权许可】

CC BY