Mystery Ailment Is Wiping Out Coast’s Starfish - SFGate
The uncontested star of coastal tide pools is disappearing from large areas along the Pacific coast, including Monterey, where the marine invertebrates have been withering and dying by the thousands.
Nobody knows what is causing the die-off, but the killer - most likely some kind of virus, bacteria or pollutant - is widespread and extremely virulent. It has ravaged a variety of different starfish species in tide pools and in deeper water along the coast from Mexico to Alaska.
Pete Raimondi, a marine biologist and lead researcher of a team of scientists, laboratory technicians and geneticists, said he has seen 90 percent of the sea stars, as the multi-armed predators are also known, die within in an infected area in just two weeks.
“Where it has hit, it has been pretty lethal,” said Raimondi, a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UC Santa Cruz. “This is going on up and down the coast. … It’s going to change what’s out there pretty fundamentally.”
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