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The Importance Of Long-Term Data Collection To Understand The Historical And Evolutionary Ecology Of Marine Diseases: The Eastern Oyster Disease System In The Usa, As A Case Study, Ryan Carnegie

VIMS Articles

The epizootics in eastern oysters, Crassostrea virginica, of haplosporidiosis or “MSX” disease caused by Haplosporidium nelsoni, and perkinsosis or “dermo” disease caused by Perkinsus marinus, were two of the most significant marine disease events of the last century. Haplosporidium nelsoni, a protozoan parasite
native to Asian populations of the Pacific oyster Crassostrea gigas, emerged in Delaware Bay in 1957 and Chesapeake Bay in 1959 (Andrews,1962; Haskin et al., 1966), and in the decades that followed caused major mortality events
from the Mid-Atlantic region of the USA to Atlantic Canada. Perkinsus marinus is a native pathogen, also a protozoan, that had …