A rapid spread of the Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease outbreak in the Mexican Caribbean
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Conservation Biology, Ecology, Marine Biology
- Keywords
- White plague, Coral mortality, disease prevalence, Reef monitoring, Long-term data, Reef functioning
- Copyright
- © 2019 Alvarez-Filip et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2019. A rapid spread of the Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease outbreak in the Mexican Caribbean. PeerJ Preprints 7:e27893v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27893v1
Abstract
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 (SCTLD), has impacted many 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, 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 (~450 km) 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.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.
Supplemental Information
Table S1. Monitoring data by site and year on coral diseases from 2005 to 2019
Susceptible species are those that presented more than 10% of SCTLD (Fig. 2, Table S2). Parque Nacional Arrecifes de Cozumel = PNAC; Parque Nacional Arrecife de Puerto Morelos = PNAPM; Biodiversity and Reef Conservation Lab, UNAM = Barco-Lab; Healthy Reefs Initiative = HRI.
Table S2. Total number of colonies recorded for each species across the 83 surveyed reefs in the Mexican Caribbean (2018 and 2019)
Death colonies are only those for which death could be attributable to the SCTLD (exposed bright white skeletons; see Fig. 1).