A virus is endangering a commercial seafood species worth millions to the southeast and the state of Florida in particular. But now UF experts are working to figure out just how the virus is killing the Caribbean spiny lobster.
A virus is endangering one of florida's top commercial seafood species, the caribbean spiny lobster, putting a multi-million dollar industry at-risk. Now the national science foundation has awarded scientists with the university of florida and several other institutions a grant of more than a million dollars to tackle the virus. Experts discovered the p-a-v-one virus in 1999 and now they're trying to figure out where it came from and how it's transmitted.
"That's one of the 80 million dollar questions is where it initially came from. We know that it can be spread between lobsters. They can eat infected tissue and contract it that way. They can contract it through contact with other lobsters," says Don Behringer, a UF fisheries researcher.
The smaller the diseased lobster, the quicker it dies. The spiny lobster provides an annual harvest of about 27-million dollars but since the discovery of the virus, fisheries have seen a 30 percent decrease of lobster.
"They're actually bringing it into the system from potentially other places in the caribbean so that may be the link that's connecting all of these populations so that's what we're really going to focus on in this newly funded national science foundation study," says Behringer.
