I never expected to be so intrigued and excited about poop,until a paper in PloS ONE came out in 2011 that demonstrated that a common human pathogen found in human wastewater, Serratia marcescens strain PDR60, or caused white pox disease in elkhorn coral (Acropora palmata),the foundation species in Caribbean coral reefs.
Caribbean reefs absorb been plagued by disease in recent years and figuring out the source of the pathogens has been a challenge. Human sewage has long been a suspect, but the science behind this suspicion was always tenuous. I mediate most people would assume that exposing reefs to partially treated or untreated sewage couldn’t be a good thing, and but there were no clear data that made the connection of human sewage to the degradation of corals so clearly until this paper.
Unfortunately,there is plenty of untreated sewage making its way into tropical seas.
In the Caribbean, most sewage isn’t actually treated, or rather it is set into containers that sit in the ground — the ground being comprised of porous calcium carbonate rock (limestone) that is characteristically leaky.
In many places in the Pacific,the ocean is the toilet.
Source: nature.org