[Coral-List] White Plague mass mortality in the Caribbean
Keven Reed
reedkc at comcast.net
Tue Feb 24 12:36:43 EST 2009
Dear all,
Though this doesn't provide the data for the correlations being considered in the thread below, it may be of interest to some coral-listers that Acropora palmata colonies on the southeastern shore of Cuba (Tom Goureau mentions the northern shore of Cuba below), outside the mouth of Guantanamo Bay, were very healthy looking at the two to four meter depth (no pox or bands) in March 2003.
The largest colony I observed on scuba at that time had a branch spread exceeding 3 meters (ten feet)!
Keven
Keven Reed, O.D.
Orange Park, Florida
----- Original Message -----
From: Thomas Goreau
To: Eugene Shinn
Cc: coral-list coral-list
Sent: Tuesday, February 24, 2009 11:05 AM
Subject: [Coral-List] White Plague mass mortality in the Caribbean
Dear Gene,
The white band spread like a wave across the Caribbean destroying the
vast bulk of the shallow corals, but other than Bill Gladfelter's
classic work in St. Croix, nobody was watching at the time, so the
detailed timing and spread remains unknown. Only Arnfried Antonius
caught it in the early stages in Vieques in 1978. Nobody who has not
seen Caribbean reefs before the 70s can imagine how rich they were,
but I have lots of old photos!
We have tried everywhere to ask the oldest divers and find old photos,
but there is precious little to go on, mostly from people who studied
magnificent reefs and then came back a varying number of years later
to find them essentially all dead. But 1979 plus or minus a year seems
to have been the big event in the eastern Caribbean (Antigua, Barbuda,
the Grenadines). The shallow reefs of the southern Caribbean (Aruba,
Curacao, Bonaire) seem to have gone around the same time. The Turks
and Caicos may, like the Bahamas, have been a bit later. We never saw
it in epidemic stage in Jamaica. But in the 1990s I could find reefs
in Panama and Mexico where one could find palmata reefs totally dead,
areas totally alive, and areas in the middle of being devastated by
WP, all in close proximity, implying that the disease pathogen (which
is still unknown) was just reaching them. In northern Cuba you can
find magnificent, but totally dead, old palmata reefs with lots of
living palmata (and some WP) growing as a separate layer on top of the
old dead palmata, whose size indicates they are about 20-30 years old,
so one would guess the mortality as the early 80s at the latest.
There seems to be no correlation of WP with whatever unknown pathogen
killed the Diadema antillarum in 1983. But you are right, that one
DOES line up with the dust maximum, although one can't do statistics
on one event.........
Best wishes,
Tom
On Feb 24, 2009, at 9:37 AM, Eugene Shinn wrote:
> Thanks Tom, I only remember that some said the Acroporas were
> recovering atter Allen and then disease struck. I thought the
> disease came in 1983 and when the Diadema went south.
> The best case I know (other than what I observed in Florida)
> was at San Salvador. The manager of the lab (Don Gerace) there as
> well as various others at the lab described how telephone pole reef
> died over a period of about one month in 1983. Along with the
> Diadema. That example impressed me because the island sits far out
> in the eastern Bahamas. I don't know what the disease...the staghorn
> just died in mass. I saw it shortly after it all died. Gene
>
>> Dear Gene,
>>
>> The chronology you propose below does not match our field
>> observations, at least in Jamaica. The Acroporas all along the
>> North Coast of Jamaica were pretty much intact until Hurricane
>> Allen in 1979, which devastated them, and from which they never
>> recovered because Coralliophila snails ate the surviving fragments
>> (Judy Lang followed that). 1979 was also the year that White Plague
>> first was reported by Bill Gladfelter devastating the USVI,
>> although Arnfried Antonius had clearly documented it a year earlier
>> in Vieques. WB seems to have raced through the eastern Caribbean
>> slightly earlier. But we never saw it have a serious impact on
>> Acropora in Jamaica because the hurricanes got them first. There
>> was no recovery of Acropora in Jamaica after the Diadema mass
>> mortality in 1983, but from time to time northers would clear off
>> the algae on ridges that focused wave energy and a few Acroporas
>> managed to settle on these few favored spots before the algae grew
>> back, but they were inevitably wiped out by bleaching, algae, or
>> white band disease later. Claims of a "recovery" of Acropora near
>> Discovery Bay are erroneous, the entire "recovered" population died
>> from bleaching before the "recovery" paper was even published. The
>> eutrophication of Jamaican reefs took place over a 40 year period,
>> following local population growth in each area. In Discovery Bay it
>> took place starting in the early 1980s, before the Diadema die off.
>> Other areas went in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and the last areas to
>> have the coastlines developed did not go until the 1990s. The
>> chronology of the coral to algae shift in Jamaica had nothing to do
>> with either overfishing or Diadema, despite considerable popular
>> mythology on the subject, and is described in T. J. Goreau, 1992,
>> Bleaching and reef community change in Jamaica: 1951-1991, in
>> SYMPOSIUM ON LONG TERM DYNAMICS OF CORAL REEFS, AMERICAN ZOOLOGIST,
>> 32: 683-695
>>
>> Best wishes,
>> Tom
>>
>> On Feb 23, 2009, at 10:20 AM, Eugene Shinn wrote:
>>
>>> Tom, I question whether it was eutrophication..the recovering
>>> acroporids died right after the Diadema died and the algae and
>>> disease took over. It was after the big hurricane...Forget if it
>>> was 1983 or 84.. The two years of maximum dust transport from
>>> Africa when Diadema, seafans, and acropora croaked everywhere in
>>> the Caribbean.
>>>
>>>> Dear Gene,
>>>>
>>>> When I first began photographing YBD in Jamaica in 1987 we
>>>> thought it was delayed recovery from bleaching, and it took Craig
>>>> Quirolo five years to convince me it was a disease. Discovery Bay
>>>> nutrients reached eutrophic levels in the early 1980s, long after
>>>> overfishing had taken its toll, and the corals were being
>>>> overgrown with algae. On those corals that were part of my long
>>>> term coral growth monitoring study, I would systematically weed
>>>> back any algae that could overgrow the corals, and it made no
>>>> difference to the corals with YBD, just as the new paper suggests.
>>>>
>>>> By the way the effect of overfishing in Jamaica was not to
>>>> eliminate herbivorous fish, as top-down dogmatists would have us
>>>> believe, but precisely the opposite. In the early 1950s the reef
>>>> was dominated by predatory and invertebrate eating fish, and
>>>> there were very few herbivorous fish. After overfishing and
>>>> coastal eutrophication the fish population switched to
>>>> overwhelmingly herbivorous species, because that is all the food
>>>> there is now. So the problem is not lack of grazers at all, but
>>>> that the over-fertilized algae grows so fast that no grazers can
>>>> control them.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> However I am not sure this lack of obvious algae interaction
>>>> applies to other coral diseases than YBD. Jennifer Smith and
>>>> colleagues, and Maggie Nugues and colleagues, have made
>>>> convincing cases for possible interactions of coral disease
>>>> pathogens and algae based on lab experiments and small scale
>>>> field associations. We found very strong associations between
>>>> many diseases and certain algae quite unexpectedly from data
>>>> analysis of large scale studies of coral reef health in the Turks
>>>> and Caicos Islands. All the coral diseases that were abundant
>>>> enough to be tabulated at all sites (White Plague, Black Band
>>>> Disease, Gorgonian Disease) were significantly associated with at
>>>> least one algae genus. However YBD was too rare there to
>>>> tabulate........
>>>>
>>>> For the detailed non-parametric statistical correlations based on
>>>> extensive ecological assessment of 26 ecological and
>>>> environmental parameters at 47 sites, including those between
>>>> algae and coral diseases, see the first paper and appendices at:
>>>> http://globalcoral.org/Turks and Caicos Islands Coral Reef Health
>>>> Assessment.htm
>>>>
>>>> Best wishes,
>>>> Tom
>>>>
>>>> Thomas J. Goreau, PhD
>>>> President, Global Coral Reef Alliance
>>>> Coordinator, United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development
>>>> Partnership in New Technologies for Small Island Developing States
>>>> 37 Pleasant Street, Cambridge MA 02139
>>>> 617-864-4226
>>>> goreau at bestweb.net
>>>> http://www.globalcoral.org
>>>>
>>>>> Date: Fri, 20 Feb 2009 09:53:51 -0500
>>>>> From: Eugene Shinn <eshinn at marine.usf.edu>
>>>>> Subject: [Coral-List] Do corals need fish to remain healthy?
>>>>> To: coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov
>>>>> Message-ID: <a0623090bc5c34a2c6813@[131.247.137.127]>
>>>>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed"
>>>>>
>>>>> The Program Manager at the Florida Keys National Marine
>>>>> Sanctuary recently made me aware of a new paper titled,
>>>>> "Macroalgae
>>>>> Has No Effect on the Severity and Dynamics of Caribbean Yellow
>>>>> Band
>>>>> Disease." Ivana Vu et. al, 2009, published in PloS Feb 09 Vol 4
>>>>> Issue
>>>>> 2. The paper is the result of an ingenious manipulative field
>>>>> study
>>>>> in Puerto Rico. As the title implies it shows, that various
>>>>> Macroalgae have no effect on CYBD in Montastraea faveolata . This
>>>>> conclusion contradicts the widely repeated mantra that these algae
>>>>> stimulate coral disease by serving as a reservoirs of pathogens
>>>>> and
>>>>> that their proliferation on reefs is due to removal of herbivorous
>>>>> fishes. In other words, remove fish (overfishing) that eat algae
>>>>> and
>>>>> the algae will grow and cause decline of coral.
>>>>> When I read the paper I was reminded of a recent conversation with
>>>>> Harold Hudson of Reef Tech who described to me what he recently
>>>>> saw
>>>>> in Roatan. "It was the biggest healthiest staghorn coral forest I
>>>>> have seen in many years", he said. What caught his eye also was
>>>>> that
>>>>> there were essentially no fish! Not even the ubiquitous Damsel
>>>>> fish
>>>>> that normally thrive among staghorn branches. It was wonderful to
>>>>> hear that such healthy staghorn fields still exist but isn't it
>>>>> odd
>>>>> that it is thriving without the usual tropicals, surgeon, and
>>>>> parrot
>>>>> fish? Similar observations have been recorded by J. Keck et al.,
>>>>> "Unexpectedly high cover of Acropora cervicornis on offshore
>>>>> reefs in
>>>>> Rotan (Honduras)" published in Coral Reefs, DOI
>>>>> 10.1007/s00338-005-0502-6 and also confirmed in a paper by B.
>>>>> Riegl
>>>>> et al, Offshore refuge and metapopulation resilience explains high
>>>>> local densisty of an endangered coral (Acropora cervicornis). In
>>>>> Marine Pollution Bulletin. Many of us can remember the luxurious
>>>>> corals on the North coast of Jamaica before the early 1980s at a
>>>>> time
>>>>> when the area had already been fished out. Apparently what ever
>>>>> started the general Caribbean decline in the late 1970s and early
>>>>> 1980s remains somewhat elusive but widespread. I suggest we need
>>>>> more straight-forward in-the-field experiments such as the Puerto
>>>>> Rico study cited at the beginning. May be we should rethink the
>>>>> commonly cited association between fishing and coral health??
>>>>> Gene
>>>>> --
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> No Rocks, No Water, No Ecosystem (EAS)
>>>>> ------------------------------------
>>>>> -----------------------------------
>>>>> E. A. Shinn, Courtesy Professor
>>>>> University of South Florida
>>>>> Marine Science Center (room 204)
>>>>> 140 Seventh Avenue South
>>>>> St. Petersburg, FL 33701
>>>>> <eshinn at marine.usf.edu>
>>>>> Tel 727 553-1158----------------------------------
>>>>> -----------------------------------
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>>
>>>
>>> No Rocks, No Water, No Ecosystem (EAS)
>>> ------------------------------------
>>> -----------------------------------
>>> E. A. Shinn, Courtesy Professor
>>> University of South Florida
>>> Marine Science Center (room 204)
>>> 140 Seventh Avenue South
>>> St. Petersburg, FL 33701
>>> <eshinn at marine.usf.edu>
>>> Tel 727 553-1158----------------------------------
>>> -----------------------------------<genes coral dust (GRL) pdf.pdf>
>>
>> Thomas J. Goreau, PhD
>> President, Global Coral Reef Alliance
>> Coordinator, United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development
>> Partnership in New Technologies for Small Island Developing States
>> 37 Pleasant Street, Cambridge MA 02139
>> 617-864-4226
>> goreau at bestweb.net
>> http://www.globalcoral.org
>
>
> --
>
>
> No Rocks, No Water, No Ecosystem (EAS)
> ------------------------------------
> -----------------------------------
> E. A. Shinn, Courtesy Professor
> University of South Florida
> Marine Science Center (room 204)
> 140 Seventh Avenue South
> St. Petersburg, FL 33701
> <eshinn at marine.usf.edu>
> Tel 727 553-1158----------------------------------
> -----------------------------------
Thomas J. Goreau, PhD
President, Global Coral Reef Alliance
Coordinator, United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development
Partnership in New Technologies for Small Island Developing States
37 Pleasant Street, Cambridge MA 02139
617-864-4226
goreau at bestweb.net
http://www.globalcoral.org
_______________________________________________
Coral-List mailing list
Coral-List at coral.aoml.noaa.gov
http://coral.aoml.noaa.gov/mailman/listinfo/coral-list
More information about the Coral-List
mailing list