A rapid spread of the Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease outbreak in the Mexican Caribbean

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.

Fish predation hinders the success of coral restoration efforts using fragmented massive corals

“…The use of fragmented massive corals expands the number of coral species available for reef restoration beyond the initial, decade-long focus on branching corals. Massive corals are key reef-building taxa that have experienced accelerated losses in the past few years due to the stony coral tissue loss disease (SCTLD) epidemic that was first detected in Florida in 2014 ( Precht et al, 2016 ; Walton, Hayes & Gilliam, 2018 ) and has now been documented in several locations in the Caribbean ( Alvarez-Filip et al, 2019 ). The impacts of SCTLD, added to the historical declines in these taxa, has created a need to move from single-taxa restoration to a community-based approach that includes corals with different life histories and disturbance responses ( Lustic et al, 2020 ).…”

“…The microfragmentation technique overcomes the slow-growth bottleneck, but methods for outplanting fragmented massive corals onto degraded reefs need to be developed and evaluated to maximize outplant survivorship and success. This is especially relevant in Florida and the Caribbean where the massive coral species used here have been severely impacted by the recent outbreak of stony coral tissue loss disease (SCTLD) ( Precht et al, 2016 ; Alvarez-Filip et al, 2019 ). The present study is one of the first to record the survivorship of small fragments of four species of massive corals ( O. faveolata , Montastraea cavernosa , P. clivosa , and P. strigosa ) outplanted onto reefs in Southeast Florida, US.…”

Effectiveness of topical antibiotics in treating corals affected by Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease

“…It has since spread throughout the Florida Reef Tract with a spatial pattern following a contagious model of transmission (Muller et al, 2020). Beginning in 2017, SCTLD began appearing in other regions of the Caribbean (Alvarez-Filip et al, 2019;Weil et al, 2019). The disease is known to affect over 20 species of corals and is characterized by multifocal acute lesions that in some cases are preceded by a bleaching margin (FKNMS/DEP, 2018).…”

Status of the pillar coralDendrogyra cylindrusin Los Roques National Park, Southern Caribbean

“…Accounting for the prevalence of diseases, bleaching and partial mortality, colony abundance and size structure, the status of Dendrogyra cylindrus subpopulation in Los Roques seems better than other areas of its global range (Acosta and Acevedo, 2006;Alvarez-Filip et al, 2019;Neely et al, 2013;Neely and Lewis, 2020;Bernal-Sotelo et al, 2019). However, we cannot conclude in terms of effective population size, for the number of genets and other traits relevant to the species viability (Marhaver et al, 2015; Neely and Lewis, 2020) were not assessed here.…”