Virus in the Mediterranean are disappearing due to climate change, research alerts

A group of Spanish researchers has raised the alarm over a "sustained and unprecedented" decline in the abundance of marine viruses in the northwestern Mediterranean over the past two decades, leading to a nutrient impoverishment of the waters.

The research also concludes that since 2011, this decline has coincided with a progressive increase in temperature and water transparency, along with a significant reduction in nutrients and phytoplankton biomass.

"This phenomenon not only affects the balance of coastal ecosystems but also human activities such as fishing, on which entire societies in the Mediterranean depend," alerted a researcher at the ICM, Dolors Vaqué.

This study, led by the team from the Institut de Ciències del Mar (ICM-CSIC), which belongs to the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), has been published in the journal ISME Communications. The CSIC is the main public research organization in Spain.

State-of-the-art method

In addition to statistical tools, the research team has benefited from artificial intelligence—in particular, neural network models—to unravel the complex interactions between viruses and their environment.

"Thanks to the combination of advanced statistics and machine learning, we've been able to look beyond immediate variability and identify hidden patterns that reveal how viruses respond to warming and nutrient loss," explained the lead author of the study, Xabier López-Alforja.

Finally, the researchers are working on sequencing and analyzing the genetic material of the viruses collected over the years to determine whether the lower abundance also affects the genetic diversity of viral communities.