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Most of the pillar coral that her team have been monitoring for
years are dead.
Hower and her colleagues are on a race against time to find what
causes a disease dubbed Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease, which
since 2014 has been raging like an inferno through reefs under
the deceptively calm blue paradise of the Caribbean.
In just five years, it has wreaked devastation on the fragile
coral ecosystems that are already at risk of extinction from the
effects of climate change.
Of 40 reef sites in the Florida Keys monitored by the Florida
Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, 38 are already
affected.
"It is a huge disaster that's going on underneath the waves,"
says Karen Neely, a coral ecologist at Nova. "This is on the
level of the Amazon burning. It is on the level of a disease
that's wiping out all of America's forests."
Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease attacks the tissue of coral,
transforming healthy, vibrant marine ecosystems into drab, dead
worlds within weeks.
The disease has ravaged much of the Atlantic reef off Florida,
spread across parts of the Caribbean, and has recently been
reported near Belize in central America. Pillar coral, whose
clusters of spiky fingers appear to reach up from the sea bed,
is "reproductively extinct" off the Florida coast, says Keri
O'Neil, chief coral scientist at the Florida Aquarium.
At the aquarium, a rare ray of hope comes from a room that has
the lights off for much of the year. Here, an elaborate and
expensive system of LED lights is designed to emulate sunrises,
sunsets and phases of the moon to coax pillar coral in tanks
into reproducing as if they were in the ocean.
Neely's team has also been laboriously applying a paste combined
with amoxicillin to the coral, which they say has been effective
in treating the disease.
Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease kills over 20 species of coral,
including most of the important ones that build the reef, hold
it together and protect the shoreline, says Neely.
Scientists are working together to try to find solutions. A
Disease Advisory Committee has been set up to help coordinate
and scientists are performing fieldwork to bolster each others'
research. They are, they say, like first responders at the scene
of a disaster.
Despite that, little is known yet about what causes the disease.
In Sarasota, Erinn Muller and her team at the Mote Marine
Laboratory's Coral Reef Research & Restoration Center are among
those trying to identify the pathogen behind it and how it
spread from Florida to the Caribbean. "We're getting these jumps
and so that would suggest that there's some type of human
influence that is allowing that jump to occur," says Muller.
Near the start of 2019, it was spotted off the coast of the
Virgin Islands. There, Marilyn Brandt of the University of the
Virgin Islands' Center for Marine and Environmental Studies and
her graduate students are ripping out the diseased coral to try
to stop it spreading.
Her team - like Neely's and others - are joining forces and
working frantically to prevent the loss of this delicate and
complex underwater world, with its iridescent colors and
rippling textures.
Such a loss would represent "a loss of biodiversity which could
be a source for future medicines, the loss of fisheries, the
loss of tourism value," says Brandt. "A lot of Caribbean islands
have part of their culture based around coral reefs and if you
lose those reefs you lose an aspect of their culture."
Photo essay here https://reut.rs/2lfuEtX
(Reporting by Lucas Jackson, Editing by Rosalba O'Brien)
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