As a marine biologist who studies disease outbreaks in the ocean, I am no stranger to pandemics. I have seen the devastation pathogens cause and how it is amplified as the oceans warm. But I have also seen the remarkable adaptations that creatures like starfish, corals and abalones develop against these threats and the defenses they deploy. Like humans, they are resilient and immunologically cunning in ways we’re continuing to discover.
Now the world is seeing the deadly path cut by a terrestrial pandemic, spread by a new coronavirus that has killed tens of thousands of people worldwide as it continues its sweep. If anything good is to emerge from this, it will be in the quest to better understanding pathogens and their hosts, to find nature’s best defenses and to apply these findings to engineer a safer world.
Right now, we are investigating whether some natural ocean habitats have superpowers to fight disease. In the tropical waters of Indonesia, our team has measured a 50 percent reduction of pathogenic bacteria and coral diseases in meadows of sea grass. These pathogenic bacteria originated in human sewage and make both people and wildlife sick.
Scientists continue to study the epidemic that has struck starfish in the Pacific and has pushed one species, the once common sunflower starfish, to endangerment. But another starfish, the intertidal ochre sea star, is holding its own. Researchers are trying to figure out whether it is developing resistance, and how.
And consider the abalone, a marine snail with blue blood that fights viruses. The protein that gives the blood its color can control cold sores and herpes through a newly discovered mechanism that blocks entry into cells by the herpes simplex virus.
We are now seeing a recently discovered coronavirus infecting salmon in the Salish Sea off southern British Columbia and northern Washington. It is in the same group of coronaviruses as the one that causes Covid-19 and those that cause MERS and SARS. It attacks the gills, so in this way is similar to the respiratory diseases caused by related mammalian coronaviruses. It has been named Pacific Salmon Nidovirus. More research into this pathogen’s spread and the defenses mounted by its salmon hosts might offer us additional insights into how coronaviruses function and how we can curb their spread in nature and in turn, reduce human infections.
These examples give me hope that we can find new ways to help protect us against the emergence of diseases. To do this, we need to figure out how pathogen-fighting processes work in nature.
2020 The New York Times Company