By: Staff Writer
February 25, 2022
A leading marine scientist says the stony coral tissue loss disease (SCTLD) is moving rapidly down the Caribbean from South Florida at a rate of a mile a month.
Dr Craig Dahlgren, executive director for the Perry Institute for Marine Science, told Caribbean Magazine Plus that since 2020 he has been watching the coral reef disease that first started showing up in South Florida waters a few years earlier and he said he has not seen it move so rapidly as he has seen in The Bahamas.
Dr Dahlgren also said: “The disease was first discovered in Florida back in 2015 or so, but since then it has spread and by 2020 we found it in The Bahamas, first documented off of Grand Bahama and then off of Nassau, New Providence and since then we have seen it in San Salvador, North Eluethera, the Berry Islands and Long Island as well.
“This is spreading fast and in the last five or six years it has spread all across the Northern part of the Caribbean and now it’s in St Lucia and places like that. It’s in about 24 different countries or territories at this time.”
Despite its growth, no one seems to know what causes SCTLD or how to stop it yet despite modern science’s best efforts to capture it. “It’s one of these things where we really don’t know, we have some strong suspects, but we really don’t have a smoking gun saying what the actual pathogen is. We haven’t been able to identify the COVID-19 virus of the coral world,” Dr Dahlgren lamented.
He also said: “What we’ve been tracking with this disease is that last year it was around Nassau and about a mile a month it was spreading. So, we would track it and first it would be off of Love Beach in that area and then we go back a couple months later and it was already around by Lyford Cay and then it’s all the way down by areas where Stuart’s Cove is diving now.
“So it’s pretty much all over the north and western part of New Providence. For Grand Bahama, it’s from West End to East Grand Bahama. It’s all over San Salvador, at least on the west side of the island. It just spreads very rapidly and it infects at least about half of the reef building corals that we have in the Bahamas and can kill some species within a week or two. Other species it might take a month or two but it’s just spreading and killing them really dramatically.”
Perhaps the $200m loan from the Inter-American Development Bank given to The Bahamas just recently will go towards helping with the research in SCTLD and more marine concerns. Dr Dahlgren said: “It’s not really clear yet how that money is going to be spent. There’s an awful lot of potential to spend it on a wide range of things, including this coral disease, to restoring the reefs affected by the disease and the fisheries that are going to be impacted as those corals die.
He added: “Also other things like mangroves that have been lost and things like that also need some of that funding to really help jumpstart some recovery there.”
Coral reefs protect coastlines from storms and erosion, provide jobs for local communities, and offer opportunities for recreation. They are also are a source of food and new medicines. Over half a billion people depend on reefs for food, income, and protection.