“I have never seen anything that affects so many species, so quickly and so viciously—and it just continues,” Marilyn Brandt of the University of the Virgin Islands told Reuters. “All the diseases I’ve studied in the past could be considered like the flu. They come every year, seasonally, and sometimes there are worse outbreaks. This thing is more like Ebola. It’s a killer, and we don’t know how to stop it.”
The disease was first spotted close to the U.S. Virgin Islands in early 2019, The BVI Beacon reported Tuesday.
Once it infects a coral, it spreads quickly, at a rate of a couple of centimeters per day.
“Within a month, you’ll have the entire coral head gone,” Association of Reef KeepersDirector Dr. Shannon Gore told The BVI Beacon.
Between corals, it moves at a rate of about five kilometers (approximately three miles) per month. Since its discovery in Florida in 2014, it has impacted more than 96,000 acres of reef and spread 250 miles down the Florida coast.
SCTLD has also been spotted off the coasts of St. Maarten, the Turks and Caicos Islands, the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Jamaica.
In addition to removing diseased coral, scientists have attempted to treat it by removing healthy corals and applying antibiotics directly to reefs, but scientists are also working on a long-term solution, including a potential probiotic, according to The BVI Beacon.
Scientists are also hoping to better understand the disease in order to find a cure.
“NOAA scientists are working with partners to identify a pathogen that causes the tissue loss, better characterize transmission of the disease, and understand the patterns of spread throughout the reef and overall impacts of the disease,” Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary research coordinator Dr. Andy Bruckner told Newsweek.
Corals around the world are more susceptible to disease because of the warmer oceantemperatures caused by the climate crisis, according to Yale Environment 360. Coral bleaching, when warm water forces coral to expel the algae that give them food and color, makes coral more likely to get sick.
The coral near Miami where the disease was first discovered had just endured both a dredging project and a bleaching event, scientists told Reuters.