September 20, 2014 — A grisly horror show is playing out along the West Coast of North America. Remains of millions of dead and dying sea stars, commonly known as starfish, litter the shoreline from Vancouver to San Diego.
Those stars are the victims of a swift and brutal illness. First, the animal’s body deflates, as if drained of all its water. Then the trademark arms begin to curl, detaching from rocks. White lesions appear, like festering canker sores. Then the star explodes as organs rupture though the body wall. The arms fall off. Ultimately, the sea star dissolves, as if melted by acid, disintegrating into goo.
Researchers in Washington state first noticed signs of the so-called “wasting syndrome” in June 2013 during routine monitoring of populations of bright purple and orange Pisaster ochraceus sea stars. The outbreak continued through the summer, spreading down into California’s central and southern coasts. Scientists hoped it would subside during the winter. It did not.
This summer, the outbreak morphed into a full-scale epidemic: Dead stars, of over 20 species, can now be found from Mexico all the way up to Alaska. It’s hard to find even a single group of stars that isn’t affected, says professor Drew Harvell of Cornell University, who spent the last year tracking the outbreak around the San Juan Islands near Seattle. The die-off is so bad that researchers have lost count of how many stars are lost. They estimate millions.
“It’s the largest epidemic we’ve ever seen with marine wildlife,” says Harvell. “We watched our populations go from thousands of stars to none over the space of a month.” The wasting syndrome has also been reported in populations along the East Coast, from New Jersey to Maine, though fewer monitoring programs exist there to quantify its spread.
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