43 North Wall dive sites to close as coral disease spreads

[loady]

I was under the impression all the Caribbean islands shared the Caribbean Sea, so the island reefs would share the same plagues? Or each island is siloed and isolated from each other with no ocean touching both? Reef diseases and conditions respect international boundaries?

 

[scubadada]

Stony Coral tissue loss disease is regional. not equally distributed to date Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease | The Caribbean Environment Programme (CEP) (unep.org) Each area should be discussed separately.

 

[Joneill]

Unfortunately, it appears the Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease continues to spread around Grand Cayman:

SCTLD : Grand Cayman Department of Environment

 

[rmorgan]

AGGRA and partners, including NOAA, have published an online SCTLD dashboard documenting the spread of this devastating coral disease. A link is attached. After seeing SCTLD in the USVI in April and watching the reporting regarding Grand Cayman, it is hard to doubt that the Caribbean’s keystone species is under extreme threat.
ArcGIS Dashboards Classic

 

[rmorgan]

 

[scubadada]

Very sad, now including the entire east end. If this was due to cruise ships, wouldn't the west side be more severely affected? Of course, I don't know where they drop their ballast,

 

[rmorgan]

The change over two months is sickening. We were on Little in 2019 and I wondered aloud whether we (in our 60s) would outlive the reef, and the boat captain said he thought we probably would. I’d never heard of SCTLD then, but here we are, less than two years later. (Although Little seems unscathed so far)

 

[deeper thoughts]

Being negative Nellie, it spread non stop through the keys
Nothing was able to slow it down

 

[rmorgan]

A recent study attributes a lot of the spread to bilge pumping, which is easily believed. The Caribbean-wide maps are terrible. It’s all over the USVI. We were in Bonaire in June, and I easily counted more than 100 big multihull sailboats down from the Virgin Islands for hurricane season.

 

[tursiops]

A recent study attributes a lot of the spread to bilge pumping, which is easily believed.

If we are talking about the same study, it is not so much an attribution as a speculation.