Rising water temperatures in the world’s oceans can expand the range of marine diseases into new regions, says researcher Charlotte Eve Davies at The Conservation website.
“Many diseases of marine species are secondary opportunist infections that take advantage when a host organism is stressed by other conditions, such as changes in pH, salinity or temperature,” she writes. “One well-documented example is the emergence of epizootic shell disease (ESD) in American lobsters.” The disease appeared after a decade of warmer than usual summers and devastated lobsters in the southern New England fishery in the 1990s. “Now there are concerns that ESD will continue to spread north to Maine’s $465.9 million lobster fishery.”
Because lobsters are shipped live to Europe from the United States, there is a risk that ESD could spread to other waters when the lobsters escape into the wild, said Davies, a post-doctoral researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. “Many other species also are showing increasing effects from marine disease,” she says, pointing to the Caribbean spiny lobster, corals and sea stars as examples. “Researchers are working around the world to determine whether and how species will survive disease events in our increasingly altered oceans.”