A sunflower sea star – credit, Ed Bierman CC 2.0.For years, a wasting disease has been turning sea stars to goo off the California coast. Scientists now finally know the cause, and are beginning to fight back.Whether it has over 20 arms like the sunflower sea star, or just 5, billions of Pacific sea stars were being wiped out by an unknown assailant.After four years of experiments from a huge collaborative effort led by the Hakai Institute, biologists finally identified the culprit: a kind of bacteria called Vibrio.Devastating to coral, shellfish, and human beings, this strain of Vibrio has been labeled FHCF-3. The scientists determined it was the cause of the epidemic by examining what might be called the sea star’s blood. It doesn’t have blood as we would recognize it, but a circulatory fluid called coelomic fluid.As to what is causing the spread of FHCF-3, ranging from Washington state down to the Baja Peninsula, the scientists point to warming waters.“We have evidence that there is a link between increasing ocean temperatures and this sea star wasting disease epidemic,” said Melanie Prentice, one of the co-authors of the paper published on the discovery in Nature, to CBS News.Sunflower sea stars, one of the species that’s been most affected, are voracious eaters of sea urchins. This slow motion game of lion and gazelle plays...
