CORAL bleaching has become something of an everyday apocalypse. Researched, documented and foretold, it is a biotic meltdown to which we have become all too accustomed. But the seas hold other more insidious disasters, as much our fault as the heating of the oceans. They tend, though, to be less covered by the media, which is why Ocean Outbreak is such an important book.
Its author, Drew Harvell, is an ecologist at Cornell University, New York, and a specialist in diseases of marine life. As head of a World Bank task force, she became increasingly worried by widespread ignorance about diseases that could destabilise temperate and tropical marine ecosystems.
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Harvell鈥檚 clear and clever prose takes us from the Indonesian coral reefs to Californian kelp beds, from Caribbean sandy beaches to Washington state鈥檚 inlets, as she shows us an unfolding series of ecological disasters.
There is the mystery disease that laid waste to most of California鈥檚 starfish, making their arms fall off and their guts spill out. Then there is the infection that made the abalone鈥檚 muscular foot wither, so that the rock-clutching mollusc couldn鈥檛 feed. Or the agent that ate holes in sea fans, creating purple halos as it went.
Piece by piece, Harvell brings the science to life, through dedicated lab and fieldwork. We see dead ends, disasters, eureka moments and slow, encouraging recoveries, as she makes plain what might have happened 鈥揳nd might still 鈥� if diseases had taken even deeper hold.
Ocean Outbreak does a first-rate job of inspiring readers, and of providing the right kind of proselytising to turn marine epidemiology into a go-to career for a new and concerned generation.
University of California Press
