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Stony coral tissue loss disease (SCTLD) is a highly destructive disease currently devastating reefs throughout Florida and the wider Caribbean. The pathogen responsible for this disease is currently unknown, but bacteria are hypothesized to play some role due to the success of antibiotics in treating disease lesions. In the largest effort to date to understand bacterial communities associated with the disease, SPCMSC scientists Kellogg and Evans, along with fellow USGS scientist Schill (Eastern Ecological Science Center) and numerous other collaborators, took part in a meta-analysis encompassing data from nearly all existing studies analyzing SCTLD-associated bacterial communities. Analyzed datasets included bacterial community data from healthy and diseased coral tissue and mucus, seawater, and sediments, and included both field-based and aquaria studies. This study represents the largest meta-analysis of coral disease microbiome data ever performed and identified several bacterial groups, including Rhodobacterales and Peptostreptococcales-Tissierellales, that seemed to drive the differences between healthy and diseased corals. The paper, titled “A meta-analysis of the stony coral tissue loss disease microbiome finds key bacteria in lesions and unaffected tissue of diseased colonies” has been published in ISME Communications.

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