An apocalyptic serial killer of sea urchins is on the loose, scientists are warning\u2014and the path of destruction it\u2019s created in recent years is likely more devastating than we knew.<\/p>\n
An international team of researchers has documented a mass die-off of black sea urchins (Diadema africanum) that began in the Canary Islands around mid-2022. The loss of life was so extensive that it could lead to a permanent local extinction of the species, they found. Even worse, the outbreak appears to be just one chain in an ongoing epidemic that threatens to rout sea urchin populations across the globe.<\/p>\n
\u201cD. africanum mass mortalities in the Canary Islands may represent a potential link in what may be considered a marine pandemic,\u201d the authors wrote in their paper, published<\/a> last month in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science.<\/p>\n A mass extinction <\/p>\n Times have been tough for Diadema\u00a0sea urchins these past few years.<\/p>\n Since 2022, there have been numerous urchin die-offs, or mass mortality events, in the waters of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The earliest known and most notable of these outbreaks devastated<\/a> populations of the long-spined sea urchin (Diadema antillarum) living around the Caribbean Islands and Florida. More recently, there was another die-off recorded in the Gulf of Oman<\/a> starting in 2023 (near Iran and Pakistan) and another recorded off the coast of R\u00e9union Island<\/a> near southern Africa in 2024.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Concurrent to these outbreaks, the study researchers say, D. africanum urchins living in the Canary Islands near northwestern Africa began to die off en masse between 2022 and 2023. It\u2019s only now, though, that they\u2019ve been able to comprehensively assess what happened to the urchins, thanks in large part to data collected by citizen scientists.<\/p>\n D. africanum urchins in the Canary Islands have bounced back from other die-offs with relative ease, even as recently as 2018. The sheer amount of destruction documented this time around was unprecented, however. Across several islands, they found no signs of juvenile urchins living in the area after the initial die-off.<\/p>\n \u201cIn other words, the die-off of the adult urchins has been so widespread that the species is no longer able to produce a next generation; if no recruitment occurs, the species may disappear from the region\u2019s ecosystem,\u201d said study author Omri Bronstein, a zoologist at Tel Aviv University, in a statement<\/a> released by Frontiers, the study\u2019s publisher.<\/p>\n A dire warning sign <\/p>\n If that isn\u2019t bad enough, the location and timing of this die-off is also concerning. It\u2019s possible, though still not confirmed, that the Canary Island outbreak is the missing link tying the Atlantic Ocean die-offs to the later die-offs seen in the Indian Ocean. And if that\u2019s true, then we\u2019re probably looking at a pandemic that could continue to spread wider into the Pacific Ocean and beyond.<\/p>\n Sea urchins are crucial to their shallow tropical environments since they feed on and keep algae populations in check that might otherwise threaten the survival of coral reefs. So the loss of these invertebrates could have untold destructive effects on other marine life.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Scientists have made some headway on the urchin problem. In 2023, a research team conclusively discovered<\/a> at least one major cause of the Caribbean die-off: a particular species of ciliate\u2014microscopic protists with hair-like projections called cilia. Different researchers have since linked<\/a> the pathogen to other recent die-offs as well.<\/p>\n Because no specimens were collected at the time, researchers say they still can\u2019t conclusively link the Canary Island outbreak to the same cause. But it\u2019s clear more has to be done to protect the world\u2019s remaining sea urchins from whatever is coming after them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An apocalyptic serial killer of sea urchins is on the loose, scientists are warning\u2014and the path of destruction…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":397586,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[34176,99395,90,149016,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":{"0":"post-397585","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-marine-animals","9":"tag-outbreaks","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-sea-urchins","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom","15":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=397585"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397585\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/397586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=397585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=397585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=397585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}