Disease suspected in mass die-offs of starfish (sea star wasting syndrome), along North American coastlines

[Emily]

Re: Disease suspected in mass die-offs of starfish along North American coastlines

http://www.kgw.com/news/washington?f...&fDomain=10212

Sea star epidemic hits Hood Canal
Credit: KING

by GARY CHITTIM / KING 5 News
Posted on June 18, 2014 at 6:39 PM
Updated Wednesday, Jun 18 at 7:10 PM


NEAR HOODSPORT, Wash. -- Diver Laura James hoped Hood Canal might be a corner of Puget Sound that would be spared from the die off of sea stars that has ravaged the entire West Coast.

She lost hope after her latest dive. The underwater walls and floor of the popular Sund Rock diving site are covered with sea stars in various stages of death...

[Emily]

Re: Disease suspected in mass die-offs of starfish along North American coastlines

http://www.peninsuladailynews.com/ar...sease-research

Peninsula volunteers pitching in on sea star wasting disease research
By Jeremy Schwartz
Peninsula Daily News
The efforts of volunteers across the North Olympic Peninsula have been vital in recent months as scientists work to uncover the secrets of a mysterious affliction eating its way through sea star populations up and down the West Coast.

?Citizen scientists? have braved slippery rocks along the northern coasts of Clallam and Jefferson counties to seek signs of the disease, called sea star wasting syndrome, in the multi-armed creatures that live on the craggy shorelines.
...

?[They have] also persisted through the winter, which we have never seen before, so it's been kind of unusual that way,? Miner said.

Wasting "Zombie" Sea Stars Found in San Diego
A mysterious disease is causing the limbs of some sea star species to fall off and dissolve, according to researchers
By Candice Nguyen
| Sunday, Jun 22, 2014 | Updated 7:08 AM PDT
...
The impacted creatures have also been referred to as "zombie sea stars."

?You would see a trail of arms and [think] 'Oh, this is going to lead me somewhere bad,' and then you keep following the arms. Sure enough there's this zombie sea star,? said UCSB research diver Sarah Sampson who is currently working in the North County. ?You see the arms crawling away.?

Sampson says there are about 11 species of sea stars in the San Diego area and she hasn?t seen about 75 percent of them since last October.

Similar die-offs have occurred before in the 1970s and 1980s but never at this magnitude and across such an widespread region.

According UC Santa Cruz researchers, since April the number of cases increased dramatically in areas including Carlsbad, La Jolla, Mission Bay and Point Loma...

Source: http://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/loca...#ixzz35a1sagn9

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[Emily]

Re: Disease suspected in mass die-offs of starfish along North American coastlines

http://www.montereyherald.com/news/c...-help-sea-star

Monterey Bay Sanctuary: Young divers help with sea star research
Program aims to develop future leaders in marine sciences

By John Sammon
Posted: 06/26/2014 04:20:25 PM PDT0 Comments | Updated: about 4 hours ago
MONTEREY >> Youthful members of the National Association of Black Scuba Divers received a wet introduction to the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary on Thursday, not principally for fun, but to contribute knowledge about a mysterious illness that is killing sea star fish.

"I saw a bat star that looked diseased, but also some healthy ones," said J' Darius Thomas, 17, from Atlanta.

Chelsea Prindle, education specialist with the marine sanctuary, said the organization hosted 25 youth ages 10 to 17 from across the country with the goal of developing future leaders in marine sciences. The sanctuary works under the federally-run National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration...

[Emily]

Re: Disease suspected in mass die-offs of starfish along North American coastlines

http://seattletimes.com/html/localne...astingxml.html

Originally published June 28, 2014 at 8:00 PM | Page modified June 30, 2014 at 12:40 PM

Starfish are ?just melting?: Disease killing 80 percent of them

A mysterious wasting syndrome is wiping out sea stars along the entire West Coast, with a new flareup in Washington hitting hard this month and walloping Oregon waters previously unaffected.

By Lynda V. Mapes

Seattle Times staff reporter

...

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.?
...
Because of their dominant role in the ecosystem, the devastation of sea star populations could lead to a reshuffling of the food web and restructuring of entire communities, in what ecologists call a ?cascade effect.?

That?s already under way in the waters of Howe Sound, off Vancouver Island, notes Jeffrey Marliave, vice president of marine science at the Vancouver Aquarium. The die-off of sea stars in Howe Sound has led to an explosion of its favorite prey, green sea urchins, whose populations now are devouring seaweed that spot prawns need for nursery grounds in their first year of life.

?We are seeing zero counts of prawn,? Marliave said. ?This cascade effect is bigger than the die-off, it is affecting the whole ecosystem.

?We have to be very humbled by this, there is no quick explanation to this, and there won?t be.?

Population correction

Marliave doesn?t point the finger to human causes, at least not yet. Populations of sea star were so dense he says he was not surprised to see a correction. ?We went for a good decade with incredible overpopulation, the crowding was incredible,? Marliave said. ?I?ll confess at first I was thinking, ?Hallelujah, something finally is controlling them.? But this is a little overboard, it is scary how badly things are going.?...

[Emily]

Re: Disease suspected in mass die-offs of starfish (sea star wasting syndrome), along North American coastlines

http://www.currypilot.com/News/Local...in-Port-Orford

Sea star disease in Port Orford
Written by Jane Stebbins, Pilot staff writer
July 08, 2014 07:19 pm

The sea star wasting disease has crept into Port Orford ? and the demise of the colorful creature could spell the collapse of the entire ecological system in which they live.

The disease is spreading quickly.
...
?There have been changes in the Port Orford area,? said Angela Johnson, faculty research assistant with PISCO, ?and not for the better.?
...
?As far as my thoughts, I could go on forever,? she said. ?It?s sad to see the most charismatic species of the intertidal (zone) suffering, and scary to not know what is causing it or how to fix it.?

[Emily]

Re: Disease suspected in mass die-offs of starfish (sea star wasting syndrome), along North American coastlines

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4024922/

Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. May 13, 2014; 111(19): 6855.
Published online May 13, 2014. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1404650111
PMCID: PMC4024922
Sea star wasting
Mark Schrope, Science Writer

In June of last year, researchers got the first report that sea stars in Washington?s Olympic National Park were succumbing to a new disease outbreak. By August, stars were falling off the rocks?dead by the thousands?at Vancouver Island. ?That?s the point at which we started getting samples and alerting people,? says Drew Harvell, a marine epidemiologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who is part of a team now sleuthing the outbreak?s cause. ?We?re looking, but it?s hard to figure out what?s going on.?
The still-mysterious condition effectively deflates the animals, causing growing lesions that break their bodies apart. Reports of further losses from the disease, which has all but eradicated multiple sea star species in certain spots, now stretch from Alaska to Mexico. It has been called ?sea star wasting syndrome? because some of the signs resemble those of conditions seen before on both North American coasts. However, this may be a misnomer, as the ongoing event has a number of characteristics distinguishing it from past known outbreaks.

Rather than a wasting them away, the condition can progress quite rapidly, even in very healthy animals. Although typical outbreaks affect a single species and end with the onset of winter, the current outbreak is hammering at least a dozen species and still going strong as spring approaches.

Harvell is currently on sabbatical at the University of Washington?s Friday Harbor Laboratories. She is working with Ian Hewson, a microbiologist at Cornell, and other colleagues, to collect and process samples in hopes of understanding what is happening. The condition is likely infectious, but they can?t yet identify the transmission route. This identification is always a challenge, but particularly in marine research, where resources are more limited than for human epidemiology.
...
Harvell says it?s too soon to say what the ecological implications of such a large loss will be. However, she points out that one of the species hit hardest, the ochre star, was the focus of the seminal paper that introduced the term ?keystone species,? a species whose populations keeps others in check. The ochres are especially important in keeping mussel populations from overtaking rocky habitats, and all of the species affected are predatory. ?There?s just no question there?s going to be a huge impacts for the subtidal seascape,? says Harvell, ?An event this large will probably have a big impact on their population biology.?...

And it seems to already be happening...

http://patriotadventures.blogspot.co...ut-island.html

Sunday, July 13, 2014
Chuckanut Island

...We landed on a nice little sandbar of the south end of the island, but the the whole place felt felt a bit "off". On all of our past visits, it had felt very inviting and full of life, but this time there seemed to be much less biodiversity and the island felt a bit foreboding. Our best guess as to what might have changed is that the island could have been hit with sea-star wasting disease. There were far fewer sea stars than we had remembered (we could only find about 12 on the whole island) and areas that had previously been bare rock and algae were covered in mats of young mussels and barnacles. We thought that this could indicate a huge reduction in sea star population due to disease, and a subsequent ecosystem destabilization. Hopefully we're wrong and I was just mis-remembering....

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/...fish-die-offs/

Scientists zero in on what?s causing starfish die-offs

BY Ashley Ahearn, EarthFix and Katie Campbell, Earthfix June 17, 2014 at 4:43 PM EDT
...
Scientists believe the pathogen spread through the water, as well as via physical contact (starfish often clump together). Another hypothesis is that the pathogen could also be concentrating in the mussels and clams that starfish like to eat.
...
At the University of California Santa Barbara Aquarium, captive sea stars started showing signs of the syndrome at the same time as their wild counterparts who live on the rocks several hundred feet from the tanks. The captive sea stars are kept in tanks of filtered seawater. In one tank they were fed mussels harvested from the rocks outside. In another tank the sea stars were fed frozen squid.

The animals that ate frozen squid stayed healthy, while the sea stars that ate the wild-harvested mussels contracted the syndrome. Blanchette cautions that these observations are purely anecdotal and the sample size is very small, but she believes this hypothesis merits further study....

[Emily]

Re: Disease suspected in mass die-offs of starfish (sea star wasting syndrome), along North American coastlines

http://www.southwhidbeyrecord.com/news/268673092.html

Dying starfish stump experts

by JANIS REID, South Whidbey Record Whidbey Crosswind
Jul 26, 2014 at 8:00AM updated Jul 27, 2014 at 8:49AM

...
This year is the first year Seablom has seen any of the ?wasted? sea stars on Whidbey. But he?s been on the lookout since the first symptoms were reported in June 2013 by researchers from Olympic National Park. Since then, sea stars along much of the North American Pacific coast are dying in great numbers from this mysterious ?star wasting? syndrome.
...
?The scientists are really stumped,? Bennett said. ?We?re hearing people say there?s piles of them. Here we?re not seeing the usual population.?

Bennett said the disease interferes with their hydraulic system and in some cases, limbs have been known to fall off and crawl away on their own.

?It?s kind of an alien thing,? Bennett said.

The disease is also highly contagious and residents are discouraged from touching or moving any of the sea stars...

[Emily]

Re: Disease suspected in mass die-offs of starfish (sea star wasting syndrome), along North American coastlines

http://www.king5.com/news/local/Seat...269620711.html

Seattle Aquarium injecting sea stars in fight against wasting disease
by GARY CHITTIM / KING 5 News
Posted on August 1, 2014 at 7:41 PM
Updated Friday, Aug 1 at 8:37 PM

...
Dr. Lesanna Lahner at the Seattle Aquarium said they have separated a group of 50 sea stars showing signs of the wasting disease into two tubs. They are treating one group with antibiotic injections and the other with a saline solution.

She said they don?t expect to cure wasting disease; the antibiotics may have no affect at all on the disease itself. But she said it could be that the disease only weakens the stars to the point they cannot defend themselves against bacteria. If the bacteria is what?s consuming the stars? bodies, the antibiotics can help the stars fight it off...

[Shiloh]

Re: Disease suspected in mass die-offs of starfish (sea star wasting syndrome), along North American coastlines

Source: http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2...tists_say.html


Mystery of sea-star deaths off Pacific coast solved, scientists say
Millions of sea stars from B.C. to Mexico dissolved into piles of goo after a virus hit about 18 months ago.
By: Camille Bains The Canadian Press, Published on Mon Nov 17 2014

VANCOUVER ? Scientists have cracked the mystery of what has killed millions of sea stars in waters off the Pacific coast, from British Columbia to Mexico.

Microbiology Prof. Ian Hewson of Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., said the culprit is densovirus, commonly found in invertebrates.

He said the virus literally made what are commonly called star fish dissolve within two to 10 days after infection, leaving them in a pile of goo on the ocean floor.

Hewson is the lead author of a study along with Ben Miner of Western Washington University that was published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

He said the wasting disease hit about 18 months ago, at a time when the number of sea stars inexplicably exploded...

[Emily]

Re: Disease suspected in mass die-offs of starfish (sea star wasting syndrome), along North American coastlines

http://phenomena.nationalgeographic....ht-be-a-virus/

The Fault in Our Stars Might be a Virus
by Ed Yong
...
?The authors present persuasive evidence that they have identified an agent associated with SSWS,? says Ian Lipkin, a virus hunter from the Mailman School of Public Health. ?Nonetheless, as they note themselves, there is much more work to be done before we will know whether the densovirus they describe is necessary and sufficient to cause disease.?
...
There?s also another mystery: why is the current outbreak of SSWS so dramatic when the newly discovered virus is actually an old presence? The team found its DNA within starfish that had been collected from the Pacific coast as far back as 1942, and that have been sitting in museum jars ever since. So why weren?t North America?s starfish melting away while World War II was raging?...

A copy of the research paper can be read here:

http://www.docstoc.com/docs/173128364/starfishbinder

[Emily]

Re: Disease suspected in mass die-offs of starfish (sea star wasting syndrome), along North American coastlines

https://digital.lib.washington.edu/r...dle/1773/27255

Effects of diet, temperature, salinity and season on wasting disease in ecologically important predatory sea stars
Ni, Zhongran; Dethier, Megan; Eisenlord, Morgan
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/1773/27255
Date: 2014-06

[Emily]

Bend student earns trip to international science fair

By Abby Spegman / The Bulletin / @AbbySpegman
Published Jun 10, 2015 at 12:01AM / Updated Jun 10, 2015 at 05:47AM
...

In 2012 Fuller counted about 2,600 sea stars; in 2014 he counted 1,120, a drop most likely due to the disease. He found that areas with higher density of sea stars in 2012 had higher rates of infections and greater declines in the healthy sea star population two years later.
Sea stars come in orange, brown and purple, and Fuller also found a greater decline in the purple sea stars compared with other colors..

http://www.bendbulletin.com/localstate/3235905-151/bend-students-research-earns-trip-to-international-science#

[Emily]

http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2016/06/23/Sea-star-death-triggers-damaging-ecological-domino-effect/6761466689877/

Sea star death triggers damaging ecological domino effect

"Howe Sound lost nearly 90 percent of its sunflower stars in a matter of weeks," said researcher Jessica Schultz.

By Brooks Hays | June 23, 2016 at 11:27 AM BURNABY, British Columbia, June 23 (UPI) -- Researchers are just now understanding the ecological consequences of the massive 2013 die-off of sea stars along North America's Pacific Coast, and the findings aren't good.
The loss of sea stars along the West Coast as a result of wasting disease was one of the largest die-offs in recent decades. A new study by marine scientists at Simon Fraser University suggests the mortality event had an ecological domino effect, affecting biodiversity and abundance in local ecosystems...

[Emily]

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0163190

Montecino-Latorre D, Eisenlord ME, Turner M, Yoshioka R, Harvell CD, Pattengill-Semmens CV, et al. (2016) Devastating Transboundary Impacts of Sea Star Wasting Disease on Subtidal Asteroids. PLoS ONE 11(10): e0163190. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0163190 Abstract

Sea star wasting disease devastated intertidal sea star populations from Mexico to Alaska between 2013?15, but little detail is known about its impacts to subtidal species. We assessed the impacts of sea star wasting disease in the Salish Sea, a Canadian / United States transboundary marine ecosystem, and world-wide hotspot for temperate asteroid species diversity with a high degree of endemism. We analyzed roving diver survey data for the three most common subtidal sea star species collected by trained volunteer scuba divers between 2006?15 in 5 basins and on the outer coast of Washington, as well as scientific strip transect data for 11 common subtidal asteroid taxa collected by scientific divers in the San Juan Islands during the spring/summer of 2014 and 2015. Our findings highlight differential susceptibility and impact of sea star wasting disease among asteroid species populations and lack of differences between basins or on Washington?s outer coast. Specifically, severe depletion of sunflower sea stars (Pycnopodia helianthoides) in the Salish Sea support reports of major declines in this species from California to Alaska, raising concern for the conservation of this ecologically important subtidal predator.

Full text at link.

[Emily]

https://marine.ucsc.edu/data-products/sea-star-wasting/updates.html

UPDATE - SEPT 28, 2021

We have received a few reports of sick Evasterias near Juneau and Kachemack Bay, Alaska, but
the majority of sea stars observed were healthy. The worst of the new outbreak appears to be
concentrated in southern British Columbia and within the Salish Sea and Puget Sound regions of
Washington, where numerous reports of sick Pisaster ochraceus and Evasterias have been
received from divers and tide poolers via our online sea star tracking log. Permanent plots at
MARINe sites in WA were resurveyed following the heatwave event, and only low levels of
diseased stars were observed at most sites; however, at one site on the Olympic Coast
approximately 30% of individuals counted within plots had mild to severe signs of SSW. The
Oregon coast appears to have been spared thus far from a re-emergence of SSW—only very
low levels of disease were observed during MARINe site surveys in July/August. The same is
true for California, where sea stars showing signs of SSW continue to be observed at only very
low numbers. Although we have not yet had a chance to look at data from our temperature
loggers, it is striking that the current re-emergence of SSW appears to be concentrated in areas
of the Pacific Northwest where some of the lowest tides of the year occurred at mid-day, during
one of the most extreme heatwaves on record. Further south, peak low tides occurred in the
morning, and air temperatures were not as extreme.

https://marinedb.ucsc.edu/seastar/seastardisease.html