> Disease: Is there a precedent in Earth's natural history of a 90% die-off in two years due to disease
On mobile, so I can't provide a link. Look up sea star wasting disease. It's affected several species of sea star from Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico. One species, the sunflower star went from being everywhere to a red listed endangered species over just a couple of years.
I'm not readily finding numbers but certainly adjectives like 'devastating', 'massive', etc, so can't specifically compare. Might we suppose that interest of study is correlated with commercial interest? But it does occur to me that it could be a confluence of factors, like the hypothesis about Colony Collapse Disorder in bees having multiple factors synergizing.
On mobile, so I can't provide a link. Look up sea star wasting disease. It's affected several species of sea star from Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico. One species, the sunflower star went from being everywhere to a red listed endangered species over just a couple of years.