What highly contagious disease has devastated Caribbean coral reefs since 2014?

The highly contagious disease that has devastated Caribbean coral reefs since 2014 is stony coral tissue loss disease.

The disease was first detected in late 2014 near Virginia Key in Miami-Dade County, Florida. It causes rapidly expanding lesions that strip living tissue from reef-building corals, sometimes killing smaller colonies within weeks and larger colonies within months.

By 2019, the outbreak had reached parts of the wider Caribbean, including Jamaica, the Mexican Caribbean, Saint Maarten and the U.S. Virgin Islands. It has since spread through additional Caribbean locations and affects at least 22 species of reef-building corals.

The disease’s exact cause remains uncertain, although researchers have investigated bacterial and viral involvement. It is often confused with coral bleaching, but bleaching is a stress response in which corals lose symbiotic algae; stony coral tissue loss disease physically destroys coral tissue through lesions.