“Coral reef ecologists have laid a persistent and troubling puzzle to rest. The elkhorn coral, named for its resemblance to elk antlers and known for providing valuable marine habitat, was once the Caribbean’s most abundant reef builder. But the “redwood of the coral forest” has declined 90% over the past decade, in part due to highly contagious white pox disease, which causes large lesions that bare the coral’s white skeleton and kill its tissue. Now, after nearly a decade of data collection and analysis, researchers have fingered the cause of the affliction: human excrement. The finding represents the first example of human-to-invertebrate disease transmission and suggests a practical approach for halting the disease’s spread.”
Really cool detective work. The more I read about microbes and viruses, I see that we’re all really one mass of interconnected organisms, testing out adjacent possibles and inadvertently passing pathogens across species and kingdoms.
And apropos for the two SciFri videos I just posted.