An apocalyptic serial killer of sea urchins is on the loose, scientists warn—and the path of destruction it’s taken in recent years may be more devastating than we realize.

An international team of researchers has documented mass die-offs of black sea urchins (African diadem) that began in the Canary Islands around mid-2022. The loss of life is so widespread that it could lead to a permanent local extinction of the species, they found. Worse, the outbreak appears to be just one chain in an ongoing epidemic that threatens to devastate urchin populations around the world.

“Mr. African The high mortality in the Canary Islands may represent a potential link to what is considered a marine pandemic,” the authors wrote in their paper, PUBLISHED last month in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science.

A mass extinction

Times are tough for Diadem sea ​​urchins in recent years.

Since 2022, there have been many sea urchin deaths, or several death events, in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The earliest known and most famous of these outbreaks DAMAGED population of long-spined sea urchin (The diadem of the Antilles) lives around the Caribbean Islands and Florida. Recently, another die-off was recorded in Gulf of Oman beginning in 2023 (near Iran and Pakistan) and another recorded off the coast of Reunion Island near southern Africa in 2024.

Coinciding with these explosions, the study’s researchers said, d. African the urchins that live in the Canary Islands near northwest Africa are beginning to disappear many between 2022 and 2023. Only now, however, have they been able to comprehensively examine what is happening to the urchins, thanks in large part to data collected by citizen scientists.

d. African Urchins in the Canary Islands have recovered from other deaths relatively quickly, even in 2018. However, the amount of destruction documented this time is unprecedented. On many islands, they found no signs of juvenile urchins living in the area after the first die-off.

“In other words, the death of adult urchins is so widespread that the species can no longer make a next generation; if no recruitment occurs, the species can disappear from the ecosystem of the region,” said the author of the study, Omri Bronstein, a zoologist at Tel Aviv University, in a statement released by Frontiers, the publisher of the study.

A dire warning sign

If that wasn’t bad enough, the location and timing of this death is also concerning. It is possible, although not yet confirmed, that the Canary Island outbreak is the missing link tying the deaths in the Atlantic Ocean to the later deaths seen in the Indian Ocean. And if that’s true, then we may be looking at a pandemic that could continue to spread across the Pacific Ocean and beyond.

Sea urchins are important in their shallow tropical environment because they feed on and suppress algae populations that can threaten the survival of coral reefs. So the loss of these invertebrates can have incalculable detrimental effects on other marine life.

Scientists have made some progress on the urchin problem. In 2023, a research group will be complete discovered at least one major cause of die-off in the Caribbean: a particular species of ciliate—microscopic protists with hairlike projections called cilia. Different researchers have since linked the pathogen in other recent deaths as well.

Because no specimens were collected at the time, researchers say they still cannot conclusively link the Canary Island outbreak to the same cause. But it’s clear that more needs to be done to protect the world’s remaining sea urchins from whatever comes next.