Human disease kills coral

In news that would be completely fascinating, were it not so damn depressing: One of the causes behind Caribbean coral die-offs seems to be a bacteria, spread from humans to the coral through sewage. It's the first time that a human disease has ever been shown to kill an invertebrate.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Before the Lights Go Out, a book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy. You can find Maggie on Twitter and Facebook.

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MORE: animals • depressing • Environment • fascinating • Nature • ocean • Science

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Kyle May

I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had, during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you’re not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area, and you multiply, and multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet, you are a plague, and we are the cure.
- peromyscus
  
  Agent Smith, outside of your Matrix, no mammal ‘instinctively develops a natural equilibrium’. You’re thinking of the blue neon things in Avatar. Mammals, like everything else, breed until natural buffers like lack of food, higher visibility to predators and increased transmission of disease start to limit their growth. Also, most viruses don’t multiply until every resource is consumed and then move on. Most of them, like colds, flu, herpes, measles and so forth do what they need to do, and leave the host alive to bear kids (generally speaking) or get infected next go round. Otherwise they’d be up shit creek, much like the coral we are reading about.
- Guest
  
  cancer isn’t generally viral (though occasionally it can be), also, virus’s reproduce using the machinery of the host cell for it’s own purposes. Virus’ don’t consume every natural resource until they are consumed, that’s bacteria. Cancer is also not a bacteria.
  
  Please, for the sake of wanting to be agreed with, just call us a scourge and stay away from the clumsy metaphors.
http://twitter.com/apollo18 Tim L

well, crap.
Antinous / Moderator

On the bright side, destruction by divers should drop sharply as news about the sewage gets out.
OriGuy

It’s the first time that a human disease has ever been shown to kill an invertebrate.

I refer you to the work by Wells, H.G., 1898.
BarBarSeven

I, for one, welcome our new human bacterial overlords… WAIT!
Bucket

Thanks to homeopathy, we know that the best way to solve this problem is to increase the amount of sewage onto the coral, thus lowering its dilution and decreasing its effectiveness.
http://illustratorhints.com/ Jesseham

S’okay… They’re already working on getting us back. See that goop up in Alaska? Step 1….