“When we came back in the spring we found sick animals so it obviously spread as it started to get warmer.” “Over this winter I surveyed here, and looked at every animal and there was no disease at all,” said Morgan Eisenlord, a Ph.D. They’ve been monitoring sites around the San Juan Islands through this past winter and expect the percentage of infected stars to continue rising as the waters warm this season. Today they estimate that number has increased to more than 40 percent.
WE NEED TO GO DEEPER STARFISH PATCH
The team checked this rocky patch last week and found 10 percent of the stars showed signs of the wasting syndrome. One arm is curled over on itself, another hangs by a thread of gnarled flesh. Harvell crouches in the sand and points at a withering orange pisaster ochraceus, or ochre star, one of the most common sea stars found in the intertidal zones of the West Coast. “My expectation is that within the next month all of the stars will die.” Sea stars are not supposed to look like that,” Harvell said.
It looks dried out, wasted, thin, deflated. From what Harvell and her team see as they survey beaches, there’s not much time for these starfish - or sea stars, as scientists prefer to call them since they’re not fish. Until recently, pockets of cold water and swift currents seem to have protected the local sea star population from the epidemic.īut with the arrival of summer, the waters around the San Juan archipelago have warmed. She had thought that the syndrome might spare Washington’s San Juan Islands. Harvell has studied marine diseases for 20 years. The disease, they say, could be compounded by warming waters, which put the sea stars under stress, making them more vulnerable to the pathogen. Scientists have been working for months to find out what’s causing the massive die-off and now Harvell and others have evidence that an infectious disease caused by a bacteria or virus may be at the root of the problem. “It affects over 20 species on our coast and it’s been causing catastrophic mortality.” Photo by Katie Campbell/Earthfix“It’s the largest mortality event for marine diseases we’ve seen,” Harvell said.
Watch this video next: Galloping Starfish and their army of sniffing, tasting, gripping tube feet.Drew Harvell, a marine epidemiologist, surveys the intertidal zone of Eastsound on Orcas Island, looking for signs of sea star wasting syndrome. I thank you on behalf of the starfishes!!
So, that long crawl back? is not both a crawl to return to comfort but also a return for SURVIVAL…įortunately the original producers of the video have said repeatedly that they had returned that specimen to the ocean shortly after they shot it. Water carries oxygen and other necessities, such as food and etc. Many echinoderms DO have a limited ability to tolerate BRIEF periods out of water… but this is essentially the animal with residual water remaining in its Water Vascular System, such as the tube feet and so on…įluid is still required for movement AND survival. This is how they move and operate all of their tube feet and so on…
WE NEED TO GO DEEPER STARFISH SERIES
Sea stars operate using a unique series of tubes in their body called the water vascular system which operates primarily using hydraulic pressure throughout the arms and so forth. Other people coming out to the beach were fascinated by the large amount of starfish and helped relocate the walkers to the water as well.Īs marine biologist and starfish expert Christopher Mah explains, it’s essential for sea stars to remain in the water: The ones that were on the sand we carefully relocated back to the ocean or a tide pool. Some were in tide pools but some were just strolling on the sand, very very very slowly. We noticed there were starfish walking around on the sand near the water. It was early evening, probably around 6pm or so at low tide. Zeb Hallock filmed this 2012 clip of a Luidia clathrata seastar in Corolla, North Carolina before relocating the animal for its safety: If you ever see a starfish walking beyond the water’s edge, help it survive by putting it back into the ocean.