Strategies for Managing Marine Disease

This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. The published version of this Preprint is available: https://doi.org/10.1002/eap.2643. This is version 2 of this Preprint.

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Authors

Caroline Kate Glidden, Laurel C. Field, Silke Bachhuber, Shannon M. Hennessey, Robyn Cates, Lesley Cohen, Elin Crockett, Michelle Degnin-Warner, Maya K. Feezell, Heather K. Fulton-Bennett

Abstract

The incidence of emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) has increased in wildlife populations in recent years and is expected to continue to increase with global change. Marine diseases in particular are relatively understudied compared to terrestrial disease, but they can disrupt ecosystem resilience, cause economic loss, or threaten human health. While there are many existing tools to combat the direct and indirect consequences of EIDs, these management strategies are often insufficient or ineffective in marine habitats compared to their terrestrial counterparts, often due to fundamental differences in marine and terrestrial systems. Here, we first illustrate how the marine environment and marine organism life history present challenges or opportunities for wildlife disease management. We then assess the application of common disease management strategies to marine versus terrestrial systems to identify those that may be most effective for marine disease outbreak prevention, response, and recovery. Finally, we recommend multiple actions that will enable more successful management of marine wildlife disease emergencies in the future. These include prioritizing marine disease research and understanding its links to climate change, preventatively increasing marine ecosystem health, forming better monitoring and response networks, developing marine veterinary medicine programs, and enacting policy that addresses marine and other wildlife disease. Overall, we encourage a more proactive rather than reactive approach to marine conservation in general and to marine wildlife disease in particular and emphasize that multi-disciplinary collaborations are key to managing marine wildlife health.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.32942/osf.io/umvae

Subjects

Life Sciences, Marine Biology

Keywords

disease ecology, Marine conservation, marine wildlife

Dates

Published: 2021-07-10 14:52

Last Updated: 2021-10-22 14:23

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License

CC-BY Attribution-No Derivatives 4.0 International