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vibriojoey t1_ize11gz wrote

I am assuming you are talking about diseases sea animals get that we dont or dont easily spread to other sea animals or land animals. One thing to know, every drop of sea water at the surface has 10 million viruses and 1 million bacteria. These number decreases as you get further offshore and dive deeper. Majority of these microscopic organisms are not pathogenic or harmful at all to us or sea life.

Many diseases are very host or tissue specific and require very narrow environmental ranges (temperature, salinity, ect...). The ocean is far more bio diverse than the land so many of the diseases have an already very narrow range of hosts assuning they can overcome their targets immune system.

Sea Turtles can suffer from an HPV virus that targets them is one example of diseases spreading amongst marine animals.

Coral is also plagued by diseases that targets them.

Bringing the topic back to us there are also plenty of Vibrio spp. (V. vulnificus, V. parahaemolyticus, V. Cholerae, V. alginolyticus) which are naturally part of the marine ecosystem but are problematic to us. But majority of Vibrio spp. are not bad to us and do not cause disease in humans.

The ocean is massive so any diseases that do occur are usually very localized and contained and any animals that do get sick are quickly picked off by predators or the corpse is eaten by scavengers which keeps the disease from spreading.

Most of the ocean is unexplored so any "epidemic" that did occur probably went unnoticed by us and nature took care of it.

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AdEnvironmental8339 t1_ize2bh6 wrote

every drop of sea water at the surface has 10 million viruses and 1 million bacteria... Seriously wow

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like_a_deaf_elephant t1_izezwkc wrote

It's completely believable which is one of those alarms that makes me want a citation.

Edit: I'll do the homework.

1 - "A teaspoon of seawater typically contains about fifty million viruses." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_viruses - Suttle, C. (2005). "Viruses in the sea". Nature

2 - "10 million viruses in a drop of seawater" - https://www.futurity.org/millions-of-marine-viruses-ebb-and-flow/

So it's the low-end estimate and probably accurate enough for trivia and Internet gossip.

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vibriojoey t1_izfenzx wrote

Its been almost a decade since I did undergrad research in marine microbiology so I was definitely trying to be conservative with that estimate :P but I am sure the numbers will vary based on polution, salinity, temperature, current flow and so on.

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like_a_deaf_elephant t1_izfngv2 wrote

Ah no doubt. It's just one of those believable claims that somehow just needs more, y'know? Nothing personal, I assure you.

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FaustGrenaldo t1_izibeli wrote

Just curious as to how a teaspoon of seawater can ' contain' so many viruses. I thought that all viruses need a host to survive? Surely, they're not just floating around in water, right?

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like_a_deaf_elephant t1_izich5a wrote

Well I'm a layman here, but there's the whole debate if viruses are even alive. I'm sure this generalisation is very wrong, but most viruses are fatty capsules of genetic material at the end of the day. They don't really need a host to survive - just to proliferate.

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oily_fish t1_izirodj wrote

They float around until they bump into a host. The majority of those viruses probably infect bacteria

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DentinQuarantino t1_izexa2r wrote

Eww. Unrelated but I have a wetsuit, snorkel and mask now up for sale. I'll throw in a beach towel and some flip flops too. Need gone.

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kung-fu_hippy t1_izfnp0i wrote

In each cubic meter of air, there is between 2 million and 40 million viruses and 1-10 million bacteria. And we breathe about 0.01 cubic meters of air a minute, so it’s not like it’s that much better on land.

Hell, since you’re breathing air through the snorkel, but wearing a wetsuit and mask for the water, you might well get more viruses from air than water while swimming.

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lubacrisp t1_izfjg2l wrote

I mean, there are about ten times more non-human cells in and on you than human ones. There's no escaping swimming in a sea of microorganisms

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mcr1974 t1_izgldm7 wrote

but why do we not feel the weight of those?

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B1U3F14M3 t1_izgmx46 wrote

You don't feel your own cells too. It's simple you always carry them around so why should you feel them. You don't feel the weight of your t-shirt unless you put it on or off because your body most of the time only feels changes in things.

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mcr1974 t1_izgnaes wrote

I mean, more than feeling - why do they not weight on the scale when I get a measurement

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lordfawn t1_izgzwch wrote

They do have weight, NIH estimates 1-3% of body weight https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-human-microbiome-project-defines-normal-bacterial-makeup-body#:~:text=Because%20of%20their%20small%20size,vital%20role%20in%20human%20health.

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mcr1974 t1_iziu3qe wrote

but then how can they be 10x as many cells and only weight 1-3‰? our own cells much bigger /heavier? edit:thinking about it, it's probably due to non-cell weight like water, minerals etc?

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Outrageousriver t1_ize5o5j wrote

Important note, there are 10 million viruses that are absolutely harmful to sea life. Viruses only exist through the destruction of other cells. However, the vast majority of these viruses target microscopic organisms. So while we as humans never directly see their impacts the ecosystem impacts of viruses are actually massive and very important in how nutrients cycle through the ocean!

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ZachTheCommie t1_izf93s5 wrote

I'd estimate that the vast majority of those viruses are bacteriophages, and pose no threat to multicellular organisms.

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vibriojoey t1_izfdl1f wrote

I assumed the author was more concerned with mostly humans and non plankton fauna. Since most marine fauna are so far evolutionary from humans the odds of viruses crossing over to us is extremely low but never zero. But phages, plant viruses, and other viruses that target protists would definitely make up the bulk of viruses in a drop of water.

Marine Microbiology is a neglected field and I would estimate there a lot of bacteria and viruses in a drop of water that dont even have a name yet. I know we found some weird H2S reducing bacteria smelly sand back in undergrad that we sent for sequencing that didnt have a species name yet it was genetically far enough from its closest Desulfovibrio it could be a new species. So who knows what else is out there if you wanted to put the effort into isolating and sequencing every specimen you can.

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Laetitian t1_izen4jz wrote

> "Viruses only exist through the destruction of other cells."

Yes, but I would assume they survive significantly longer in ocean water than they would in a dry place on land, right? Thus those 10 million viruses in a seawater drop wouldn't all necessarily have infected an orgamism quite as recently as you would expect from our experience with viruses in the air or on a dry surface.

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dkickfire t1_izey0gq wrote

Even in freshwater we have things like whirling disease caused by a parasite that seriously impacts trout populations and is very communicable to other fish, some species (rainbow and cutthroat) are dramatically impacted while others are somehow resistant (browns and bulls). It’s actually a pretty big issue out west for trout fisheries after it made it’s way from Europe in the 50’s

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[deleted] t1_izeq38p wrote

I think the OP was wondering whether we live more densely on land than in the sea, and maybe if that has an effect. Like, how often does one fish spread an illness to a neighboring fish, versus, how often a sick kid at school touches a door knob and gets the class sick, type of thing?

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Gandzilla t1_izgd17u wrote

Could an epidemic be the reason for the missing crabs in alaska?

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