Project: Collaborative Research: RAPID: A multi-scale approach to predicting coral disease spread: leveraging an outbreak on coral-dense isolated reefs

NSF Award Abstract:
Marine diseases have devastating impacts on ocean ecosystems and this work directly informs understanding of disease transmission in the ocean. To understand the cause and patterns of spread of a disease outbreak that began in late summer of 2022 at the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary (northwest Gulf of Mexico, GoM), a team of ecologists, ocean connectivity and disease modelers, microbiologists, and coral immunologists (from Rice University, the University of Virgin Islands (UVI), Louisiana State University (LSU), and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) is monitoring the health of corals, and biopsy their tissues. This data aid in developing a model that predicts coral disease transmission and its impacts on economically valuable coral reefs in the GoM. This project supports multidisciplinary field and laboratory research experiences of graduate students at multiple minority-serving institutions, and provides undergraduate students with hands-on training in modeling, ecological and molecular analysis techniques. UVI and LSU are in EPSCoR jurisdictions and have diverse student bodies, including numerous under-represented minority (URM) students. The research team collaboratively provides URM students with research experiences in STEM fields. Project findings are being broadly communicated through virtual public programming, to the Disease Advisory Council, and via direct updates to managers of the Flower Garden Bank National Marine Sanctuary.

Over the last four decades, diseases decimated ecosystem engineers in marine coastal environments, including coral reefs. Recent results from studies of white plague and stony coral tissue loss disease (SCTLD) show coral species immune traits can influence disease resistance and therefore predict of coral community structure post-outbreak in the Caribbean. In late August of 2022, an unidentified multi-species acute tissue loss disease with signs and species susceptibility characteristics reminiscent of white plague or SCTLD was documented at the Flower Garden Banks (northwest Gulf of Mexico, GoM). This disease is having significant impacts on FGB and could become widespread across the GoM, offering an opportunity to test hypotheses about the influence of coral community composition and pathogen dispersal on disease spread during the early stages of an outbreak; few studies examine this on relatively isolated, deep, coral-dense reefs. The interdisciplinary research team employs photomosaics and colony fate-tracking, layered molecular datasets and microscopy approaches, as well as modeling of disease reservoirs and dispersal to assess the etiology of the disease and contribute to the development of a generalizable framework for disease spread on reefs. By parsing the impacts of reef-scale community composition versus seascape-scale dispersal in disease transmission and persistence, this work helps reveal the potential resistance and resilience of isolated, coral-dense reefs to diseases that decimate these ecosystems across the wider Caribbean.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.