How Will Climate Change Effect Harmful Marine Bacteria Brought on by Saharan Dust?

A population explosion of the flesh-eating bacteria, Vibrio, may just be one of the many realities the Gulf Coast will face in the future.
Every summer big dust plumes leave the Saharan and Sahel deserts in Africa and travel across the Atlantic. The dust eventually gets deposited in the Atlantic, Caribbean and Gulf—including coastal Texas.
Dr. Michael Wetz, Assistant Professor of Marine Biology at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, has secured a $220,758 grant that will allow him to provide insight into the effects of global climate change on growth of marine bacteria such as Vibrio. The grant, funded by the National Science Foundation, will provide the first look on how marine bacteria respond to the long term effects of Saharan Dust.
Vibrio is common in bodies of water, including Corpus Christi Bay, and lives off energy from its environment. This is where Saharan dust comes in. Bacteria, like Vibrio, absorb nutrients from the dust that falls in the ocean and use these nutrients to survive and multiply. More dust in our atmosphere means more dust in our oceans and could trigger a population explosion of Vibrio.
“Climate models suggest that the Saharan and Sahel regions of Africa are likely to become drier over the coming century due to climate change,” said Wetz. “These factors suggest that there will likely be more of this dust going into the atmosphere and oceans, potentially leading to more outbreaks of organisms such as Vibrio.”
Wetz said other studies suggest that this dust affects growth of not only vibrio, but also microbes that cause coral disease in the Caribbean, as well as growth of the red tide organism in the Gulf of Mexico.
Wetz will focus on Vibrio’s response to Saharan dust and identify the key components of the dust that causes bacterial outbreaks in the environment.
“One of my big research interests is understanding how climate and human-driven environmental change affects coastal water quality,” said Wetz. “This study has direct linkages to climate change, and the response of these organisms will have significant implications for the health of our marine ecosystems.”
The project is set to take place in the Florida Keys and Wetz will collaborate with Dr. Erin Lipp from the University of Georgia, who is the Primary Investigator on the project. Other collaborators include Dr. Bill Landing from Florida State University, Dr. Liz Ottesen from the University of Georgia, Dr. Dale Griffin from USGS, and Texas A&M-Corpus Christi Professor of Mathematics Dr. Blair Sterba-Boatwright.
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By Aaron W Hunter
A chance discovery of a beautifully preserved fossil in the desert landscape of Morocco has solved one of the great mysteries of biology and paleontology: how starfish evolved their arms.
The Pompeii of palaeontology. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<h2></h2><p>Although starfish might appear very robust animals, they are typically made up of lots of hard parts attached by ligaments and soft tissue which, upon death, quickly degrade. This means we rely on places like the Fezouata formations to provide snapshots of their evolution.</p><p>The starfish fossil record is patchy, especially at the critical time when many of these animal groups first appeared. Sorting out how each of the various types of ancient starfish relate to each other is like putting a puzzle together when many of the parts are missing.</p><h2>The Oldest Starfish</h2><p><em><a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/216101v1.full.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Cantabrigiaster</a></em> is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. It was discovered in 2003, but it has taken over 17 years to work out its true significance.</p><p>What makes <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> unique is that it lacks almost all the characteristics we find in brittle stars and starfish.</p><p>Starfish and brittle stars belong to the family Asterozoa. Their ancestors, the Somasteroids were especially fragile - before <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> we only had a handful of specimens. The celebrated Moroccan paleontologist Mohamed <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2016.06.041" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Ben Moula</a> and his local team was instrumental in discovering <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0031018216302334?via%3Dihub" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">these amazing fossils</a> near the town of Zagora, in Morocco.</p><h2>The Breakthrough</h2><p>Our breakthrough moment came when I compared the arms of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> with those of modern sea lilles, filter feeders with long feathery arms that tend to be attached to the sea floor by a stem or stalk.</p><p>The striking similarity between these modern filter feeders and the ancient starfish led our team from the University of Cambridge and Harvard University to create a new analysis. We applied a biological model to the features of all the current early Asterozoa fossils in existence, along with a sample of their closest relatives.</p>Cantabrigiaster is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<p>Our results demonstrate <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> is the most primitive of all the Asterozoa, and most likely evolved from ancient animals called crinoids that lived 250 million years before dinosaurs. The five arms of starfish are a relic left over from these ancestors. In the case of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em>, and its starfish descendants, it evolved by flipping upside-down so its arms are face down on the sediment to feed.</p><p>Although we sampled a relatively small numbers of those ancestors, one of the unexpected outcomes was it provided an idea of how they could be related to each other. Paleontologists studying echinoderms are often lost in detail as all the different groups are so radically different from each other, so it is hard to tell which evolved first.</p>President Joe Biden officially took office Wednesday, and immediately set to work reversing some of former President Donald Trump's environmental policies.
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