The sea turtle to the left has fibropapillomatosis, a tumor-forming disease linked to a herpes virus. While these tumors can appear grotesque, not all are malignant. Fibropapillomatosis has been around since the 1980s, but the cause has been unknown. A new paper in PLoS ONE by Van Houtan, Hargrove, and Balazs analyzed clusters of the virus in locations with high nutrient runoff. And here's where the story gets interesting... The authors discovered a relationship between eutrophication (excess nitrogen), an invasive species of algae, sea turtles, and the disease. It goes like this:
The invasive algae stores excess nutrients in a particular amino acid
Turtles eat that algae
The metabolized amino acid promotes the herpes virus infection and, in turn, tumor formation
So it turns out that the root cause of the whole chain of events--leading to the large tumors we're observing in sea turtles--is not the result of one of ...
