Unknown plague is killing off West Coast sea stars
Source: Seattle Times
Unknown plague is killing off West Coast sea stars
By LYNDA V. MAPES
The Seattle Times June 29, 2014 Updated 28 minutes ago
SEATTLE - A mysterious killer is wiping out sea stars along the entire West Coast of North America, with 20 species affected.
Called Sea Star Wasting Syndrome, the outbreak hitting the coast from Alaska to Mexico was first reported from Olympic National Park in Washington last summer, and has continued to take out sea stars with merciless efficiency. Entire ecosystems may reshuffle as the top predators of the near shore succumb. And as summer draws people to beaches, a beloved sea creature is dissolving before our eyes.
Katie Pyne and Haila Schultz, student researchers at the University of Puget Sound, were shocked as they surveyed sea stars at Alki beach this week. "It's just melting," Pyne said of a purple sea star disintegrating before her eyes. The smell of rotting flesh filled the cove along a jetty, and sea stars dripped from the rocks, in a slow-motion fall to their deaths.
Lisa Keith of West Seattle, a volunteer beach naturalist with the Seattle Aquarium, was sickened by the devastation of the sea star communities at Constellation Beach in south Alki. "As a beach lover, it was disturbing, everything was so gooey and drippy and falling off the rocks and turning into bacterial mats, I thought I would just leave the beach," Keith said.
"They are falling apart right in front of you, it is a little shocking."
Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/06/29/231853/unknown-plague-is-killing-off.html?sp=/99/200/#storylink=cpy
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Sunflower Sea Star
Photograph by Paul Nicklen, National Geographic
A sunflower sea star is draped moplike over a seafloor rock off the British Columbia coast. Though commonly called starfish, sea stars are not fish but echinoderms, more closely related to sea urchins and sand dollars. Only the five-armed species really resemble stars—others may boast as many as 40 appendages.
http://ocean.nationalgeographic.com/ocean/photos/starfish/
I've seen these:
Pisaster ochraceus
Pisaster ochraceus, generally known as the purple sea star, ochre sea star or ochre starfish, is a common starfish found among the waters of the Pacific Ocean...
Effects from ocean acidification
A study found that Pisaster ochraceus will not be affected by ocean acidification in the same way as most calcareous marine animals. This normally causes decreased growth due to the increased acidity dissolving calcium carbonate. Researchers found that when Pisaster ochraceus was exposed to 21 °C (70 °F) and 770 ppm CO2 (beyond rises expected in the next century) that they survived. It is thought that this is because the animals' calcium is nodular and so it is able to compensate for the lack of carbonate by growing more fleshy tissue instead.[14][15]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pisaster_ochraceus
Well, something is killing them, isn't it?
This is heartbreaking. Like the BP oil volcano. I read about some fishermen who volunteered to fly helicopters over the Gulf to rescue marine animals. There were so many and the dead and dying animals seemed to go on forever.
One or more of the men committed suicide after seeing what to them, was unbearable. They were experienced mariners, but their hearts were too broken at what they saw. Like the death of the world, an apocalypse.
At times, I wonder if BP and other big polluters like the Koch brothers have knowledge about the demise of ecosystems and are just getting what they can before they all collapse, which seems to heartless and immoral to us, but logical to them?
One of my favorite pictures of the shoreline:
Will these images be all that remains of this living treasure in our midst?
