Thermal Stress and Coral Cover as Drivers of Coral Disease Outbreaks

By J. Bruno, E. Selig, K. Casey, C. Page, B. Willis, C. D. Harvell, H. Sweatman, Amy Melendy. PLoS Biology, 2007

858 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Very little is known about how environmental changes such as increasing temperature affect disease dynamics in the ocean, especially at large spatial scales. We asked whether the frequency of warm temperature anomalies is positively related to the frequency of coral disease across 1,500 km of Australia's Great Barrier Reef. We used a new high-resolution satellite dataset of ocean temperature and 6 y of coral disease and coral cover data from annual surveys of 48 reefs to answer this question. We found a highly significant relationship between the frequencies of warm temperature anomalies and of white syndrome, an emergent disease, or potentially, a group of diseases, of Pacific reef-building corals. The effect of temperature was highly dependent on coral cover because white syndrome outbreaks followed warm years, but only on high (>50%) cover reefs, suggesting an important role of host density as a threshold for outbreaks. Our results indicate that the frequency of temperature anomalies, which is predicted to increase in most tropical oceans, can increase the susceptibility of corals to disease, leading to outbreaks where corals are abundant.

Subfields: Ecology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/44d70159556daaf4cb897a5e49847964ae2e4c5b

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Citations in the corpus

Recent disturbances augment community shifts in coral assemblages in Moorea, French Polynesia (2011, background): “…effects of climate change on coral reefs, including widespread coral bleaching (Hughes et al. 2003) and increasing prevalence of coral disease (Bruno et al. 2007), have caused extensive coral loss and contributed greatly to coral reef degradation throughout the world (Knowlton 2001) and will…”
Rebuilding coral reefs: does active reef restoration lead to sustainable reefs? (2014, background): “Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 2014, 7:28–36 highly degraded, and exposed to multiple persisting and envisaged threats [2,3].”
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Caribbean Corals in Crisis: Record Thermal Stress, Bleaching, and Mortality in 2005 (2010, background): “Mass coral bleaching from thermal stress, followed by outbreaks of contagious or opportunistic diseases [18,36,37], have become a threat common to coral reefs globally.”
Regional Decline of Coral Cover in the Indo-Pacific: Timing, Extent, and Subregional Comparisons (2007, background): “In fact, recent surveys of coral diseases on the GBR indicate that disease frequency increased dramatically over the last five years, particularly on the outer GBR [54] and following periods when water temperature was anomalously high [55,56].”
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Air temperature and winter mortality: Implications for the persistence of the invasive mussel, Perna viridis in the intertidal zone of the south-eastern United States (2011, background): “…as a driver of mortality in many marine species at temperate and subpolar latitudes (Orton, 1933; Harley et al., 2006; Coma et al., 2009; Firth and Williams, 2009; Sorte et al., 2011) and disease outbreak is often associated with increased temperatures (Harvell et al., 1999; Bruno et al., 2007).”
Impacts of a Regional, Multi-Year, Multi-Species Coral Disease Outbreak in Southeast Florida (2018, background): “Coral disease, especially in the Caribbean, was once typically described as more prevalent during summer months affecting less than 5% of the population and only a few species (Rutzler et al., 1983; Edmunds, 1991; Bruno et al., 2007; Weil and Croquer, 2009; Muller and van Woesik, 2012; Ruiz-Moreno e”
Effects of benthic algae on the replenishment of corals and the implications for the resilience of coral reefs (2008, background): “impending climate change, with increasing sea temperatures and consequent increases in severity and frequency of mass coral bleaching (hoegh-Guldberg 1999) and coral disease (bruno et al. 2007), inevitably followed by coral mortality and subsequent algal overgrowth, will seriously reduce the capacit”
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Climate change and coral reef bleaching: An ecological assessment of long-term impacts, recovery trends and future outlook (2008, background): “On the Great Barrier Reef, Selig et al. (2006) and Bruno et al. (2007) found that disease outbreaks were facilitated by positive temperature anomalies and previous bleaching.”
Deciphering Coral Disease Dynamics: Integrating Host, Microbiome, and the Changing Environment (2020, positive): “In some cases, predictive models were successfully developed to describe the relationship between disease dynamics and environmental drivers (Bruno et al., 2007; Williams et al., 2010; Maynard et al., 2011, 2015).”
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Scientists’ warning to humanity: microorganisms and climate change (2019, neutral): “Human activities that cause a reduction in microbial diversity also reduce the capacity for microorganisms to support plant growth. the disease mechanisms are not absolutely clear for all the different syndromes, associations with microbial pathogens exist 224–226 .”
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