Ward and Lafferty conducted an online search of 5,900 journals published from 1970 to 2001 to measure the proportion of reports of disease in nine groups or marine organisms: turtles, corals, mammals, urchins, mollusks, seagrasses, decapods (crustaceans), sharks/rays, and fishes. Their approach also takes into account potential confounding factors, such as the effect of a particularly prolific author or a single disease event reported multiple times. They found a clear increase in disease in all groups except seagrasses, decapods, and sharks/rays. And they found that disease reports actually decreased for fishes. (One explanation for this decrease could be that drastic reductions in population density caused by overfishing present fewer opportunities for transmitting infection.)
These results confirm scientists' perceptions about the rising distress of threatened populations and thus reflects a real underlying pattern in nature. That disease did not increase in all taxonomic groups suggests that increases in disease are not simply the result of increased study and that certain stressors, such as global climate change, will impact disease in complex w
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Contact: Catriona MacCallum
cmaccallum@plos.org
44-1223-494-488
Public Library of Science
13-Apr-2004