The World's Biggest Study on Parasites Has Found Something Terrible

Parasites are not all bad, and in a rapidly changing world, they need our protection, but they don't seem to be getting it.
In fact, in the second-largest estuary in the United States, scientists have cataloged a mass die-off among marine organisms that rely on free-living hosts to survive.
Over the past 140 years, from 1880 to 2019, parasite numbers in Puget Sound dropped by 38 percent for every degree Celsius of warming in sea surface temperature, researchers at the University of Washington (UW) have found.
The study is the largest and longest dataset on parasite abundance collected anywhere in the world, and the results are even worse than some conservationists had feared.
Parasites are the invisible threads that help tie food webs together. How ecosystems will cope without their influence is unclear.
The World's Biggest Study on Parasites Has Found Something Terrible. They're Dying.