Scientists identify the Caribbean sea urchin killer
NEW YORK — Last year, sea urchins in the Caribbean started getting sick — dying off and throwing reef ecosystems into chaos. Now, scientists think they’ve caught the killer in this marine murder mystery.
A tiny single-celled parasite is to blame for the massive die-off, researchers reported Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.
“The case is closed,” said study author Mya Breitbart, a marine microbiologist at the University of South Florida.
These long-spined sea urchins are prickly black creatures that hide out in reefs across the Caribbean. They play a key role as “lawnmowers” of the reef, Breitbart said, eating up the algae that grows on corals.
But in January 2022, those animals started showing strange symptoms — their sharp spines drooping and falling off, their suction-cup feet losing their grip — before dying off in droves, from the Virgin Islands to Puerto Rico to Florida.
For marine scientists, it was deja vu: Another die-off swept through the region in the 1980s and slashed sea urchin populations by around 98%.
That case was never solved. But this time, an international team of researchers jumped into action, taking samples from sick urchins and healthy ones across the Caribbean to look for genetic clues.
They didn’t see signs of viruses or bacteria, said study author Ian Hewson, who researches marine diseases at Cornell University. But they did spot traces of tiny single-celled organisms called ciliates, which only showed up in the sick urchins.
Though most ciliates don’t cause disease, this kind has been linked with other aquatic outbreaks, Hewson said.
To confirm they’d caught the killer, scientists placed the parasites in tanks with healthy urchins to see how they’d react. Out of 10 urchins pitted against the tiny creatures, 60% of them died — after showing the same symptoms researchers saw in the wild.
It’s possible that this same parasite also caused the die-off in the 1980s, but scientists can’t be sure, Breitbart said.