But what causes the condition? A pair of undergraduate students studying marine science through the UF/IFAS School of Forest, Fisheries & Geomatics Sciences are part of a research team working to find out.
During the summer, Melanie Gomez, of the Orlando area, and Kamila Koralasbayev, of Bethesda, Md., joined Robert Lamb, an assistant research professor with the UF/IFAS Nature Coast Biological Station, and nearly a dozen other scientists studying affected sea life in the Galápagos Islands.
“It was an incredible experience,” Gomez said. “We learned so much in such a fast amount of time—more than we could have in any year-long class.”
Lamb had encountered ulcerative skin disease while monitoring fish populations in the Galápagos as part of his Ph.D. thesis research. He and UF colleagues Donald Behringer, Roy Yanong, Kuttichantran Subramaniam, and Felipe Pierezan subsequently connected the 2014–2016 El Niño climate pattern to an outbreak of the disease, and they expected another outbreak during the 2023–2024 El Niño. When photos revealed sick fish last year, the researchers secured a National Science Foundation grant. Subsequent funding from the UF College of Agricultural and Life Sciences allowed Gomez and Koralasbayev to travel, too.
Lamb said El Niño events act as “natural laboratories” that “fast-forward” climate change years into the future by creating marine heat waves.
“Warmer water facilitates the metabolism of pathogens,” he said. “At the same time, it reduces the amount of food, and the fish have less to eat, so their immune systems become compromised.”
Koralasbayev, in turquoise, and Gomez, in navy, work with researchers in the lab. (Image credit: Gomez and Koralasbayev)
In the Galápagos, Gomez and Koralasbayev conducted underwater surveys to understand how populations of marine fish and invertebrates respond to variations in environmental conditions such as temperature.
At the Charles Darwin Research Station in Puerto Ayora, Ecuador, the students dissected hundreds of fish collected from ocean waters of different temperatures to learn how ocean warming affects metabolism and parasite loads. Isotope analysis of muscles and livers revealed what the fish ate and their position within the food web. Measurements of otoliths, inner ear bones responsible for sensing gravity and movement, revealed how much the fish grew.
Koralasbayev described the lab as a factory chain of researchers working in sync.
“We got to experience every single part of that chain, and that was super interesting to see and to get that hands-on experience,” she said. “You never get that in a class. When are you realistically going to have the time to spend hours and hours in a lab like that?”
Back at Lamb’s UF lab, Gomez and Koralasbayev are busy drying and pulverizing several thousand samples of fish tissue so that a mass spectrometer instrument can measure its atomic structure for food web analysis. The students will eventually contribute to studies written and published about the data they collect.
Lamb praised Gomez and Koralasbayev for their contributions to the project, which he credits for expediting the process.
“They were able to help us get really high-quality samples that we weren’t able to get in the past,” he said. “So, this is not just a training exercise; they were really a vital component of this team.”
