The world has had more than enough viruses right now as evident by the new coronavirus pandemic. It is hard to overstate the incredible vastness of the virosphere that scientists haven't even scratched the surface although a thousand kinds of viruses have already been studied in detail. Some think that there could be a trillion species overall.
What's more mind-boggling is that in oceans, tens of millions of different kinds of sea creatures lurk that if you go find them you can identify hundreds of thousands of new species -so abundant that it defies our imagination- living in the water with more than 10 million viruses per milliliter.
Fortunately, with the vast population of viruses, a new study from the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) led by marine ecologist Jennifer Welsh explored two encouraging constants.
Viruses can infect every living thing, it just so happens that some animals actually prey on them, in a sense by removing them from the environment. However, little is known about what underlies the virus removal phenomenon by ambient non-host organisms, explains Welsh and her team.
Removal of Viruses by non-host organisms
Welsh and her team conducted a series of experiments of 10 different non-host organisms to examine the range of how these marine organisms fared at removing viruses from their aquatic environment, either through active predation or passive mechanisms.
In their experiment, non-host organisms did not display virus enrichment. Out of the organisms tested, the crabs, cockles, oysters, and sponges prove to be the most effective at reducing viral abundance.
Moreover, sponges turned out to reduce the presence of viruses up to 94 percent within three hours, according to Welsh. The figure goes up even at 98 percent virus removal after a full 24 hours.
The uptake of viruses happens very quickly and efficiently as shown in another experiment. The sponges remained extremely effective in virus removal even if the researchers introduced new viruses to the water every 20 minutes.
In comparison, the second most effective ocean creature is crabs, removing 90 of viruses over 24 hours, while cockles were able to reduce viral presence in the water by 43 percent, oysters removed 12 percent of the viruses.
But since the experiments are done inside a laboratory, the results may not be equally successful in the wild, given the range of behavioral changes that occurs in bio-diverse aquatic environments and other environmental variables present under the sea.
Useful in Aquaculture
Nevertheless, Welsh and her team think that this natural ability of non-host animals in reducing the abundance of virus particles in the oceans is something people can use in aquaculture farming, where sponges can be used as some kind of a shield against viral pathogens to protect farm populations.
Welsh explains that in saltwater farms, large amounts of samples of a single species live together in a monoculture that if there is a breakout on a contagious disease, the risks are high that pathogens will spread to the wild populations living in the sea.
But adding enough sponges, the danger of a viral outbreak would possibly be stopped. "The results of this research show that this would be a good follow up research project," according to Welsh.
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