Models with environmental drivers offer a plausible mechanism for the rapid spread of infectious disease outbreaks in marine organisms
Year: 2020
Type: article
Abstract: The first signs of sea star wasting disease (SSWD) epidemic occurred in just few months in 2013 along the entire North American Pacific coast. Disease dynamics did not manifest as the typical travelling wave of reaction-diffusion epidemiological model, suggesting that other environmental factors might have played some role. To help explore how external factors might trigger disease, we built a coupled oceanographic-epidemiological model and contrasted three hypotheses on the influence of temperature on disease transmission and pathogenicity. Models that linked mortality to sea surface temperature gave patterns more consistent with observed data on sea star wasting disease, which suggests that environmental stress could explain why some marine diseases seem to spread so fast and have region-wide impacts on host populations.
Source: Scientific Reports
Institutions: Hopkins Marine Station, Stanford University, United States Geological Survey, University of California, Santa Barbara, Western Ecological Research Center, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, University of California, Santa Cruz, NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service Southwest Fisheries Science Center
Language: English
Subfield: Aquatic Science
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $1,870
Awards: Collaborative Research: Mechanisms of resistance and resilience to system-wide loss of a keystone predator in an iconic intertidal community, Collaborative Research: Evaluating how abalone populations in the California Current are structured by the interplay of large-scale oceanographic forcing and nearshore variability, CNH: Enhancing Resilience of Coastal Ecosystems and Human Communities to Oceanographic Variability: Social and Ecological Feedbacks
OpenAlex ID: W3015151443