ANTANANARIVO — Researchers studying a coral disease that has devastated reefs across the Caribbean say they’ve come up with a promising treatment that avoids the long-term harm associated with antibiotics, currently the most effective remedy. In a study published November 2024 in Frontiers in Marine Science, the researchers showed how the application of chlorine, typically used as a disinfectant to kill microorganisms, can reduce the impact of stony coral tissue loss disease (SCTLD). The disease attacks the soft tissue of a wide range of reef-building coral species, killing them quickly. Mortality rates in some cases can be as high as 100%. Marine biologist Greta Aeby, an independent researcher in Hawai‘i, and colleagues mixed chlorine into cocoa butter so that they could get a paste to apply onto diseased corals at Horseshoe Reef, near the British Virgin Islands in the Caribbean. After approximately 80 days, the rate of tissue loss among hard corals when treated this way was 17.6%. Over that same period, treatment with a paste of the antibiotic amoxicillin resulted in a tissue loss rate of around 1.7%. That makes the antibiotic, which is commonly used to treat SCTLD, significantly more efficient than chlorine. But the use of antibiotics has long raised concerns among researchers, who warn that long-term use can contribute to marine pollution, which is harmful to living organisms due to the development of antimicrobial resistance. “Crabs, fish and even humans within the same environment face a high risk of contracting bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics,”…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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