News Ecosystems

Fish Epidemic Traces to Novel Germ

By Janet Raloff

Most angst over emerging diseases has focused on infections that suddenly strike people, the way AIDS appeared to have done in the early 1980s. However, a new study indicates that wildlife too are susceptible to new plagues.

A healthy striped bass, hauled out of the Chesapeake Bay (above), and a sick one (below) with nodules, which appear as round, grayish spots on internal organs. Anthony Overton

In the late 1990s, a mysterious epidemic hit the Chesapeake Bay’s striped bass (Morone saxatilis), one of the eastern seaboard’s most prized fish. Scientists at the Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine (VMRCVM) in College Park, Md.,