43 North Wall dive sites to close as coral disease spreads

[rmorgan]

Yeah, fair, but it’s peer-reviewed, at least, and while current’s surely a big factor, ballast discharge certainly seems like a good candidate. Here’s the article I referenced: Deadly coral disease sweeping Caribbean linked to water from ships

 

[AggieDiver]

Given that research, has there been any talk in the Caymans of stopping the Aggressor from making the trip back and forth from Grand to Little every week? Seems like an easy vector for the spread that could be stopped. Not wanting to see somebody’s business get harmed, but if I had to choose the health of the Bloody Bay Wall over the health of any one business, it is an easy choice for me, and I hope for the Caymans as well.

 

[KathyV]

Given that research, has there been any talk in the Caymans of stopping the Aggressor from making the trip back and forth from Grand to Little every week? Seems like an easy vector for the spread that could be stopped. Not wanting to see somebody’s business get harmed, but if I had to choose the health of the Bloody Bay Wall over the health of any one business, it is an easy choice for me, and I hope for the Caymans as well.

It would be difficult to restrict boat traffic to an island. I can't imagine that it would be possible to stop the supply barge, which travels internationally and makes weekly stops on GC, CB, and LC , from making its regular trips. The islands really depend on the goods that the barge brings, especially the Sister Islands. The Aggressor is just one boat out of many that visit the islands.

 

[AggieDiver]

It would be difficult to restrict boat traffic to an island. I can't imagine that it would be possible to stop the supply barge, which travels internationally and makes weekly stops on GC, CB, and LC , from making its regular trips. The islands really depend on the goods that the barge brings, especially the Sister Islands. The Aggressor is just one boat out of many that visit the islands.

Yeah, it was just a thought. Though I thought the barge went to GC after the sister islands, but I could be wrong. Just scares me to think of the Aggressor spending time in the infected waters on GC, then mooring up for days on the very best sites in the BBMP. Seems like a recipe for eventually ruining the finest reef in the Caribbean.

 

[rmorgan]

SCTLD has "rapid spread, persistence, and extreme virulence." (Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease biomarker bacteria identified in corals and overlying waters using a rapid field-based sequencing approach) It's as though it started out as the Delta variant, in COVID terms. So given the current reach of it (as of January 2021, it affected corals in the waters off of the entire Florida Keys, the Bahamas, Honduras, the Mexican coast, Grand Cayman, the USVI, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, and the eastern chain down to Saint Lucia--and that was months ago), the choices seem to be to throw up hands, or consider what might be seem extreme measures in (perhaps futile) hopes of palliation. Scientists are putting antibiotic-infused putty around SCTLD sites on individual coral heads, and good on 'em for having a go--but surely this is more an erstwhile experiment than any sort of solution.

As to the Aggressor, I share AggieDiver's concerns; it goes Grand-Little-Brac, each for days at a time, and then does it again, and again, and again. One might hope that they will follow the protocol of bleaching everything on a site-by-site basis; but of course you can't bleach the hull of a ship in the middle of the ocean, and who knows what evil lurks where; the bacterium (or virus; I think there's been no definitive identification of the pathogen yet) is obviously relentless once it has a toehold. KathyV is certainly right that the supply ship is essential to the Sister Islands . . . but it doesn't hover over the reefs. Does that matter? I don't think anyone knows. Of course, it's a moot point: The Aggressor sails on Saturdays from now on. The Aggressor fleet, like all Caribbean dive operators, surely has a profoundly-vested interest in doing anything and everything to save what can be saved: Corals are the keystones of the reefs, of course, and reef fish around corals heavily impacted by SCTLD. Yet I could find no mention of SCTLD on the Aggressor website. This is not to single out the Aggressor folks: We were in St Croix, in April, and did not hear a word about SCTLD, even as we were moved from (to my observation) badly-infected to less-infected sits in the same two-tank morning. (It's a bit like going from black-and-white to color TV.)

SCTLD kills at least 19, and probably 24, species of hard coral, and in Florida, from whence it came, reports are of reef fish increasingly becoming afflicted with parasites. Related? Who knows for sure. But the article linked above notes, "Tissue loss on corals in the USVI progress at rates up to 35-fold higher than other common coral diseases and leads to complete mortality of over half of afflicted colonies." Can the larger animals not be, eventually, devastated?

So can the sport-diving community to anything? Who knows. Rental gear seems like a good plan for anyone going from island to island, and photographers are invited to send images to AGRRA for diagnosis. Beyond that, at least there is a lot of scientific endeavor focused on the problem. But it's hard to be optimistic. A scientist studying the Great Barrier Reef in 2018 said "It's heartbreaking to hear. The usual pops, chirps, snaps and chatters of countless fish and invertebrates have disappeared. The symphony of the sea is being silenced." The next few years will certainly be interesting.