Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary Coral Disease Outbreak

During routine monitoring in August 2022, disease lesions were reported on some corals in the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary (Johnston et al., 2023), a historically resilient reef in the Gulf of Mexico. To date, we do not know whether this disease outbreak is consistent with white plague, stony coral tissue loss disease (SCTLD), or some other disease. I am using transcriptomics to investigate the viral communities associated with healthy and diseased corals. To investigate whether the coral disease outbreak associated with the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary could be SCTLD, I am comparing these viral communities with those associated with SCTLD-affected corals in Florida and the U.S. Virgin Islands.