Since early 2022, sea urchins have been mysteriously dying off across the Caribbean. Now scientists say they have identified the main culprit.
Decades of restoration efforts had made some progress when an alarmingly similar mortality event began to spread in January 2022, wiping out thousands of urchins. This time, scientists across the United States and the Caribbean sprang into action., using different approaches. Hewson’s team compared the entire set of active genes, or the transcriptome, of healthy and sick urchins from 23 sites across the Caribbean.
Upon a closer look, the scuticociliates tended to cluster in the sick urchins’ body walls and at the base of their spines. The microorganisms were absent from healthy urchins.The next step was to isolate the pathogen and infect healthy urchins. Four days after infection, six of 10 infected urchins lost many spines — a common symptom of sick urchins. None of the uninfected urchins lost spines.
“It was really exciting to see,” says Michael Sweet, a marine disease ecologist at the University of Derby in England, who wasn’t involved in the study. “Scary, but also exciting to see the [ciliate’s] name mentioned in a different context becauseWhile the scuticociliate clearly plays a pivotal role, Sweet says, there are almost certainly other factors at play, such as other microorganisms or environmental stressors, that could help explain what triggered the start of the recent die-off.
For now, it’s unknown if the same pathogen was involved in the 1980s die-off. Hewson’s team hopes to answer that question by looking at museum specimens from the period.
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