Antibiotics, the ubiquitous cure for human ills, also may be a treatment for white band disease affecting certain coral species, California researchers report.
White band disease caused unprecedented declines in Acropora cervicornis and Acropora palmata corals, both now on endangered species lists. The disease has two subtypes and a potential pathogen for one type has been proposed.
David Kline of Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif., and research teammate Steven Vollmer applied WBD tissue to healthy coral fragments then compared transmission rates using various filtering measures. The untreated disease homogenate resulted in a 90 percent transmission rate. When the homogenate was filtered but still contained bacteria and viruses the transmission was 80 percent, while a filter that excluded most bacteria and contained mainly viruses resulted in only a 10 percent transmission rate.
Kline and Vollmer said the findings implicate bacteria as the primary pathogens of one subtype of the disease, and suggest viruses alone aren't likely to be the disease's cause.
Disease homogenates treated with the antibiotics ampicillin and tetracycline almost completely prevented WBD transmission, the researchers found. The authors said the findings suggest that antibiotics could be used as a potential treatment for one type of white band disease, although more study was necessary.
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