ABSTRACT
A marine scientist, Margaretha Brongersma-Sanders, looking for an explanation for petroleum deposits, published an exhaustive account 38 years ago of mass mortalities in the world's oceans - a massive review (70 pages of very small print) of every published event up to that time.1 She considered physical, chemical, and biological causes of mortalities, but it is interesting that she had no category for epizootic disease or pollution-induced mortalities and made absolutely no mention of the role of disease or of pollution in the sea in all those 70 pages of fine print. Maybe this is understandable, since her background was in marine geology, but events have occurred in the past three and one-half decades that justify a reappraisal of mass mortalities in the sea - from a different but probably still biased viewpoint.
