Climate Change Influences on Marine Infectious Diseases: Implications for Management and Society

Abstract

Infectious diseases are common in marine environments, but the effects of a changing climate on marine pathogens are not well understood. Here we review current knowledge about how the climate drives host-pathogen interactions and infectious disease outbreaks. Climate-related impacts on marine diseases are being documented in corals, shellfish, finfish, and humans; these impacts are less clearly linked for other organisms. Oceans and people are inextricably linked, and marine diseases can both directly and indirectly affect human health, livelihoods, and well-being. We recommend an adaptive management approach to better increase the resilience of ocean systems vulnerable to marine diseases in a changing climate. Land-based management methods of quarantining, culling, and vaccinating are not successful in the ocean; therefore, forecasting conditions that lead to outbreaks and designing tools/approaches to influence these conditions may be the best way to manage marine disease.

Complementary approaches to diagnosing marine diseases: a union of the modern and the classic

“…Marine diseases may have important ecological, economic, conservation and human health impacts [1][2][3][4]. An increase in the reported frequency and severity of marine diseases [5,6] demands that complementary tools and approaches be used for rapid and effective diagnosis.…”

Temperature-induced behavioral switches in a bacterial coral pathogen

“…Although disease is a natural process in any ecosystem, the influence of a changing climate on host-pathogen interactions has the potential to markedly shift the incidence of disease and thus alter ecosystem structure and functions in unpredictable ways (Burge et al, 2014). Within coral reef ecosystems there is growing evidence that coral diseases are most prominent during the warmest months of the year and that corals are losing their seasonal reprieve from disease advancement as mean winter temperatures rise (Weil et al, 2009;Heron et al, 2010;Case et al, 2011;Burge et al, 2014).…”

“…Within coral reef ecosystems there is growing evidence that coral diseases are most prominent during the warmest months of the year and that corals are losing their seasonal reprieve from disease advancement as mean winter temperatures rise (Weil et al, 2009;Heron et al, 2010;Case et al, 2011;Burge et al, 2014). However, it remains unclear whether this pattern occurs as a consequence of increased coral susceptibility above specific thermal thresholds, shifts in the behavior or virulence of the responsible pathogens, or a combination of both factors.…”

“…For example, the bacterium Vibrio shiloi causes only slow partial bleaching at 23°C, but rapid and severe bleaching at 29°C in the Mediterranean coral Oculina patagonica (Toren et al, 1998;Banin et al, 2001). Similarly, the globally distributed bacterial pathogen Vibrio coralliilyticus (Pollock et al, 2010) causes rapid tissue lysis of its coral host, Pocillopora damicornis, when temperatures exceed 26°C (Ben-Haim and Rosenberg 2002;Ben-Haim et al, 2003) and is more abundant in heat-stressed corals (Tout et al, 2015b), whereas increases in Caribbean Yellow Band Disease between 1998 and 2010 have been associated with elevated winter seawater temperatures (Burge et al, 2014;Weil et al, 2009).…”

Discrete stochastic marine metapopulation disease model

“…This is the case of the susceptible animal contacting with or filtering infective particles from the environment once are released by living or dead infected individuals; that is, the case of black-band disease (Richardson, 2004;Zvuloni et al, 2009) and Aspergillosis (Jolles et al, 2002) in corals, whithering syndrome (WS) in abalone (Moore et al, 2001(Moore et al, , 2002 and transmission of trematode cercariae (De Montaudouin et al, 1998), shrimps with White-Spot disease (Rudolf and Antonovics, 2007) shedding particles during decay and scavenging processes, OsHV1virus in pacific oysters (Schikorski et al, 2011), MSX (Haskin et al, 1966) and Dermo (Mackin et al, 1950) diseases in oysters; Perkinsosis in clams (Paillard, 2004;Dang et al, 2010). The proliferation of these marine infectious diseases are causing mass mortalities (Ward and Lafferty, 2004;Burge et al, 2014;Lafferty et al, 2015) threatening ecologically valuable habitats and resulting in substantial economic losses in fisheries and aquaculture (Walker and Winton, 2010;Lafferty et al, 2015).…”