Stony coral tissue loss disease moves faster than anything our monitoring program has tracked: a colony can go from healthy to dead in weeks, and the disease has now been confirmed at reefs on the south side of St. Thomas.
Our response is triage. Monitoring divers photograph and flag lesions on every survey; confirmed cases get treated with an antibiotic paste that stops the lesion line in about eight of ten colonies. Rare and old colonies get priority — some of the brain corals we treat are older than the territory’s roads.
You can help from the water: if you dive or snorkel and see white lesions spreading across a stony coral, note the location and report it through our contact page. Early reports have already saved two reefs this season.
