Strategies for managing marine disease

Abstract

The incidence of emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) has increased in wildlife populations in recent years and is expected to continue to increase with global environmental change. Marine diseases are relatively understudied compared to terrestrial diseases but warrant parallel attention as they can disrupt ecosystems, cause economic loss, and threaten human livelihoods. While there are many existing tools to combat the direct and indirect consequences of EIDs, these management strategies are often insufficient or ineffective in marine habitats compared to their terrestrial counterparts, often due to fundamental differences between marine and terrestrial systems. Here, we first illustrate how the marine environment and marine organism life histories present challenges and opportunities for wildlife disease management. We then assess the application of common disease management strategies to marine versus terrestrial systems to identify those that may be most effective for marine disease outbreak prevention, response, and recovery. Finally, we recommend multiple actions that will enable more successful management of marine wildlife disease emergencies in the future. These include prioritizing marine disease research and understanding its links to climate change, improving marine ecosystem health, forming better monitoring and response networks, developing marine veterinary medicine programs, and enacting policy that addresses marine and other wildlife diseases. Overall, we encourage a more proactive rather than reactive approach to marine wildlife disease management and emphasize that multi-disciplinary collaborations are crucial to managing marine wildlife health.

Preparing for a Bsal invasion into North America has improved multi-sector readiness

“…Although this work is not yet completed after a decade of Bsal Task Force activities, the preparation for a Bsal invasion is far ahead of past experience with other amphibian-disease threats (Garner et al, 2016;Mendelson et al, 2019;Martel et al, 2020). The lessons learned we outline in this paper can serve as a model for other strategies to manage wildlife disease (e.g., marine wildlife disease: Glidden et al, 2022).…”

Artificial shelters and marine infectious disease: no detectable effect of the use of casitas to enhance juvenile Panulirus argus in shelter-poor habitats on a viral disease dynamics

“…On the other hand, selective predation on infected prey does not always reduce infection prevalence ( Lopez & Duffy, 2021 ), and some models have shown that when the most heavily infected individuals in a population are culled, disease prevalence may increase due to persistence of less virulent strains of the parasite which are able to establish in sparser populations ( Bolzoni & De Leo, 2013 ; Behringer et al, 2020 ). Indeed, many authors do not consider culling an effective way to manage marine infectious diseases because of the dearth of knowledge on the relative importance of other environmental drivers and mechanisms of transmission and dispersion of pathogens in the ocean, and on the spatial scales at which infective stages and host larvae may travel (reviewed in Groner et al, 2016 ; Shields, 2018 ; Glidden et al, 2022 ). In the absence of this information, culling as a potential mechanism to manage the PaV1 disease remains contentious.…”

“…Culling diseased individuals during surveillance or fishing operations has also been suggested as a means to reduce disease transmission if the culled individuals are disposed of at land ( Behringer et al, 2012 ). However, whether culling is an efficient way to manage marine diseases is still a matter of debate ( Groner et al, 2016 ; Behringer et al, 2020 ; Glidden et al, 2022 ).…”

Marine diseases and the Anthropocene: Understanding microbial pathogenesis in a rapidly changing world

“…The successful mitigation and management of marine diseases are dependent, in part, on research that addresses our knowledge of microbial virulence and host‐pathogen interactions (Glidden et al., 2022 ; Groner et al., 2016 ). Here, we put forward three related questions, which, if addressed, would considerably advance our understanding of marine disease and pave the way for successful mitigation strategies to protect our oceans in the future.…”