Last year, sea urchins in the Caribbean started getting sick—shedding their spines, dying off and throwing reef ecosystems into chaos. Now, scientists think they’ve caught the killer in this marine murder mystery.
, sea urchins in the Caribbean started getting sick—shedding their spines, 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, or Diadema antillarum, 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, these 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%.
Footage of research conducted in St. John US Virgin Islands in April 2022 and August 2022. Credit: Ian Hewson, Cornell University
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.
