Collaborative Research: RAPID: A multi-scale approach to predicting coral disease spread: leveraging an outbreak on coral-dense isolated reefs

海洋疾病对海洋生态系统具有破坏性影响，这项工作直接有助于了解海洋中的疾病传播。为了了解2022年夏末在花园银行国家海洋保护区（墨西哥湾西北部）爆发的疾病爆发的原因和传播模式，一个由生态学家、海洋连通性和疾病建模师、微生物学家和珊瑚免疫学家（来自莱斯大学、维尔维京群岛大学（UVI）、路易斯安那州立大学（LSU）和伍兹霍尔海洋研究所）组成的团队正在监测珊瑚的健康状况，并对其组织进行活检。这些数据有助于开发一个模型，预测珊瑚疾病的传播及其对墨西哥湾具有经济价值的珊瑚礁的影响。本项目支持研究生在多个少数民族服务机构进行多学科实地和实验室研究，并为本科生提供建模、生态和分子分析技术方面的实践培训。弗吉尼亚州立大学和路易斯安那州立大学都在EPSCoR管辖范围内，拥有多样化的学生团体，包括许多未被充分代表的少数民族（URM）学生。研究团队合作为URM学生提供STEM领域的研究经验。项目的调查结果正通过虚拟公共规划、疾病咨询委员会和通过直接向花园银行国家海洋保护区的管理人员通报最新情况而广泛传播。在过去的四十年里，疾病摧毁了包括珊瑚礁在内的海洋沿海环境的生态系统工程师。最近对白鼠疫和石珊瑚组织丧失病（SCTLD）的研究结果表明，珊瑚物种的免疫特性可以影响疾病抵抗力，因此可以预测加勒比地区珊瑚群落的结构。2022年8月下旬，在墨西哥湾西北部的花园河岸（Flower Garden Banks）记录了一种不明的多物种急性组织损失疾病，其体征和物种易感特征令人想起白色鼠疫或SCTLD。这种疾病正在对珊瑚群落产生重大影响，并可能在墨西哥湾广泛传播，从而提供了一个机会，可以在爆发的早期阶段检验关于珊瑚群落组成和病原体扩散对疾病传播的影响的假设；很少有研究在相对孤立的、深的、珊瑚密集的珊瑚礁上检验这一点。跨学科研究小组采用了显微观察和种群命运追踪、分层分子数据集和显微镜方法，以及疾病储存库和扩散的建模，以评估疾病的病因，并为疾病在珊瑚礁上传播的可推广框架的发展做出贡献。通过分析珊瑚礁规模的群落组成与海景规模的扩散对疾病传播和持久性的影响，这项工作有助于揭示孤立的、珊瑚密集的珊瑚礁对疾病的潜在抵抗力和恢复力，这些疾病在更广泛的加勒比地区摧毁了这些生态系统。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Marine diseases have devastating impacts on ocean ecosystems and this work directly informs understanding of disease transmission in the ocean. To understand the cause and patterns of spread of a disease outbreak that began in late summer of 2022 at the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary (northwest Gulf of Mexico, GoM), a team of ecologists, ocean connectivity and disease modelers, microbiologists, and coral immunologists (from Rice University, the University of Virgin Islands (UVI), Louisiana State University (LSU), and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) is monitoring the health of corals, and biopsy their tissues. This data aid in developing a model that predicts coral disease transmission and its impacts on economically valuable coral reefs in the GoM. This project supports multidisciplinary field and laboratory research experiences of graduate students at multiple minority-serving institutions, and provides undergraduate students with hands-on training in modeling, ecological and molecular analysis techniques. UVI and LSU are in EPSCoR jurisdictions and have diverse student bodies, including numerous under-represented minority (URM) students. The research team collaboratively provides URM students with research experiences in STEM fields. Project findings are being broadly communicated through virtual public programming, to the Disease Advisory Council, and via direct updates to managers of the Flower Garden Bank National Marine Sanctuary. Over the last four decades, diseases decimated ecosystem engineers in marine coastal environments, including coral reefs. Recent results from studies of white plague and stony coral tissue loss disease (SCTLD) show coral species immune traits can influence disease resistance and therefore predict of coral community structure post-outbreak in the Caribbean. In late August of 2022, an unidentified multi-species acute tissue loss disease with signs and species susceptibility characteristics reminiscent of white plague or SCTLD was documented at the Flower Garden Banks (northwest Gulf of Mexico, GoM). This disease is having significant impacts on FGB and could become widespread across the GoM, offering an opportunity to test hypotheses about the influence of coral community composition and pathogen dispersal on disease spread during the early stages of an outbreak; few studies examine this on relatively isolated, deep, coral-dense reefs. The interdisciplinary research team employs photomosaics and colony fate-tracking, layered molecular datasets and microscopy approaches, as well as modeling of disease reservoirs and dispersal to assess the etiology of the disease and contribute to the development of a generalizable framework for disease spread on reefs. By parsing the impacts of reef-scale community composition versus seascape-scale dispersal in disease transmission and persistence, this work helps reveal the potential resistance and resilience of isolated, coral-dense reefs to diseases that decimate these ecosystems across the wider Caribbean.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.