Drew Harvell

A fascinating story of Harvell's research into disease outbreaks in coral, abalone, salmon, and starfish, especially along the US West Coast. Harvell does a good explaining the science, as well as the process of the science, and balances this with her personal perspective. For me, the balance was perfect. This is a niche subject, but the book is accessible and not overly long.

I was disappointed, though, by how hard Harvell plugs more funding for her work as a "solution" to ocean outbreaks. Better monitoring of diseases will do nothing to ameliorate them. We cannot treat or vaccinate wild ocean species. Since these outbreaks are all connected to global warming, the only way to stop them is with policy changes to stop greenhouse gas pollution. Throwing Harvell and her collaborators a few million dollars seems worthwhile in terms of getting interesting science, but it won't solve any problems. (Possibly it could help with aquaculture outbreaks, or with localized pollution problems that cause disease.)

> The world's coral reefs, our most diverse and valuable marine ecosystems, are being sickened by a variety of factors all at once. Our only chance to limit their loss lies in understanding how all the threats to coral interact with and affect each other.

> With the threat of the imminent extinction of tropical corals, white abalone, and our sunflower star, and their cascading ecological impacts, we crossed a line in the sand. As a society, we can no longer stand by idly. We have let loose many destructive forces over which we have little control, but science can still make a difference. The problem is that inadequate funding remains a major impediment to scientists identifying the causes of disease outbreaks in the ocean, investigating the contributing factors, and developing solutions. … The whole thing would have played out differently if we had had the right resources from the start—not only funds from school children who stepped up to help, but also government funding. If the starfish outbreak was instead a deadly virus epidemic among humans, like Ebola, we would have had massive resources at our disposal to investigate the pressing questions surrounding the outbreak. Instead, many people acted as if this huge epidemic affecting a keystone species in the ocean was simply a curiosity and assumed scientists would figure it out.

A few other quotes:

> rickettsia is a very slowly incubating disease agent. It took almost a year before the abalone were conclusively infected. The long incubation period was also why the range of the pathogen initially looked much larger than the range of sick abalone … On land, rickettsial bacteria are never free living and can survive only inside the cells of a host. Scientist call them obligate intracellular parasites. They are always transmitted by a bite from an insect vector like a tick or a mite. Two diseases of terrestrial animals caused by rickettsial bacterial are Rocky Mountain spotted fever and typhus. It is tricky to confirm a rickettsia as the cause of a disease, since they hide inside cells and thus cannot be detected by a simple blood test. … since seawater has essentially the same salinity as abalone blood, the bacterium can survive briefly outside a host and can thus be transmitted in seawater. She and her student Lisa Crosson tested infectivity and found that the rickettsia remains viable in seawater for at least twenty-four hours. It is extraordinary that this rickettsial bacterium deviates from the normal transmission biology of requiring a vector on land

> A mere eight months after this Atlantic salmon spill, Governor Jay Inslee banned all Atlantic salmon farming in Washington State. His legislation will prevent new farms and will phase out all existing farming by 2025, bringing to an end three decades of non-native fish farming. Washington State now joins Alaska in banning commercial finfish aquaculture

> Following Bob's experimental manipulation, the stretch of shore without ochre stars became encrusted with what Bob called a "mussel glacier"—a huge dark mass of thousands of mussels packed together stretching from the subtidal to far up in the intertidal. The mussel bed crowded out many other species, like green sea anemones, green sponges. and pinkish sea squirts … Bob coined the term keystone species in a 1969 note about food webs for the kind of ecological role the starfish assumed in the rocky intertidal.

> a big outbreak of disease in sunflower stars in British Columbia. On the blog of echinoderm expert Chris Mah, Echinoblog, people were posting striking photos

> The almost complete loss of the mighty sunflower stars and several other species in deeper waters has allowed a huge influx of sea urchins, whose populations from California to Alaska had previously been controlled by the voracious sunflowers. The hordes of hungry sea urchins have decimated kelp beds … A paper published in 2018 by a team of scientists from the University of California at Merced, led by Laura Schiebelhut, reported some very good news: big increases in populations of the ochre stars and newly recruited baby stars that were growing up. Most exciting, their complete genetic analysis of stars before the outbreak compared to after the outbreak showed a big genetic change. They suggested that the epidemic had killed all the susceptible stars and the survivors were hardy genetic stock that was resistant to the virus. The bad news is that new surveys in 2017 show that the sunflower star is virtually gone from California to Alaska.

> I find it particularly galling that the entire municipality of Victoria, Canada dumps all its sewage, untreated, into the richest waters on our continent… (altro)