Conservation translocations are subject to considerable uncertainty and risk, of which disease is one of the most recognized. To address disease risks, several protocols for qualitative disease risk analysis (qDRA) exist and are used for responsible conservation translocation planning. Existing qDRA protocols usually rely on expert judgment, but they lack quantitative aggregation of elicited estimates, transparent treatment of...

Increasing trends of coral mortality are a challenge to coral reef management worldwide, and a need exists to identify the causes and pathways involved. Pathology is useful to help decipher potential causes of mortality in animals, because it illuminates agents associated with lesions and gives insights on the nature of how a host responds to said agents. To better understand the nature of threats facing corals in the Arabian...

Stony coral tissue loss disease (SCTLD) was first documented in 2014 near the Port of Miami, Florida, and has since spread north and south along Florida’s Coral Reef, killing large numbers of more than 20 species of coral and leading to the functional extinction of at least one species, Dendrogyra cylindrus . SCTLD is assumed to be caused by bacteria based on presence of different molecular assemblages of bacteria in lesioned...

Samples from eight species of corals ( Colpophyllia natans , Dendrogyra cylindrus , Diploria labyrinthiformis , Meandrina meandrites , Montastraea cavernosa , Orbicella faveolata, Pseudodiploria strigosa , and Siderastrea siderea ) that exhibited gross clinical signs of acute, subacute, or chronic tissue loss attributed to stony coral tissue loss disease (SCTLD) were collected from the Florida Reef Tract during 2016–2018 and e...

The Arabian Peninsula borders the hottest reefs in the world, and corals living in these extreme environments can provide insight into the effects of warming on coral health and disease. Here, we examined coral reef health at 17 sites across three regions along the northeastern Arabian Peninsula (Persian Gulf, Strait of Hormuz and Oman Sea) representing a gradient of environmental conditions. The Persian Gulf has extreme seaso...

In 2007, a phase shift from corals to corallimorpharians (CM) centered around a shipwreck was documented at Palmyra Atoll, Line Islands. Subsequent surveys revealed CM to be overgrowing the reef benthos, including corals and coralline algae, potentially placing coral ecosystems in the atoll at risk. This prompted the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the lead management agency of the atoll, to remove the shipwreck. Subsequent su...