Coral disease following massive bleaching in 2005 causes 60% decline in coral cover on reefs in the US Virgin Islands

By Jeff Miller, E. Muller, C. Rogers, R. Waara, A. Atkinson, K. Whelan, M. Patterson, B. Witcher. Coral reefs, 2009

400 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In the northeast Caribbean, doldrum-like conditions combined with elevated water temperatures in the summer/fall 2005 created the most severe coral bleaching event ever documented within this region. Video monitoring of 100 randomly chosen, permanent transects at five study sites in the US Virgin Islands revealed over 90% of the scleractinian coral cover showed signs of thermal stress by paling or becoming completely white. Lower water temperatures in October allowed some re-coloring of corals; however, a subsequent unprecedented regional outbreak of coral disease affected all sites. Five known diseases or syndromes were recorded; however, most lesions showed signs similar to white plague. Nineteen scleractinian species were affected by disease, with >90% of the disease-induced lesions occurring on the genus Montastraea. The disease outbreak peaked several months after the onset of bleaching at all sites but did not occur at the same time. The mean number of disease-induced lesions increased 51-fold and the mean area of disease-associated mortality increased 13-fold when compared with pre-bleaching disease levels. In the 12 months following the onset of bleaching, coral cover declined at all sites (average loss: 51.5%, range: 42.4–61.8%) reducing the five-site average from 21.4% before bleaching to 10.3% with most mortality caused by white plague disease, not bleaching. Continued losses through October 2007 reduced the average coral cover of the five sites to 8.3% (average 2-year loss: 61.1%, range: 53.0–79.3%). Mean cover by M. annularis (complex) decreased 51%, Colpophyllia natans 78% and Agaricia agaricites 87%. Isolated disease outbreaks have been documented before in the Virgin Islands, but never as widespread or devastating as the one that occurred after the 2005 Caribbean coral-bleaching event. This study provides insight into the effects of continued seawater warming and subsequent coral bleaching events in the Caribbean and highlights the need to understand links between coral bleaching and disease.

Subfields: Biotechnology, Ecology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9efe7e813ae875713cac6be4a76e4558fb33b745

How researchers see this paper

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In Biotechnology

1. K. Ritchie
2. J. Bythell
3. E. Weil
4. A. Cróquer
5. William J. Skirving
6. T. Smith
7. A. Bruckner
8. S. Walsh

In Ecology

1. K. Ritchie
2. E. Weil
3. J. Bythell
4. A. Cróquer
5. M. Sweet
6. Isabel Urreiztieta
7. G. Diaz-Pulido
8. H. Guzman

Citations in the corpus

• Bacterial assemblages differ between compartments within the coral holobiont (2011, background): “associations can be altered due to environmental stress (Ritchie 2006; Bruno et al. 2007; Miller et al. 2009), potentially enhancing opportunistic infections (Lesser et al.”
• Caribbean Corals in Crisis: Record Thermal Stress, Bleaching, and Mortality in 2005 (2010, background): “Reports detailing change through time at individual sites have been published and continue to be published elsewhere [15,20,21,22].”
• Reef-Scale Thermal Stress Monitoring of Coral Ecosystems: New 5-km Global Products from NOAA Coral Reef Watch (2014, background): “thermal stress is severe or long-lasting or if it leads to subsequent disease in the colony [1,8,9].”
• Temporal variability and impact of coral diseases and bleaching in La Parguera, Puerto Rico from 2003–2007 (2009, background): “Intensive bleaching followed by an outbreak of WPD was also reported for the Virgin Islands (Miller at al.”