Scientists say they have found the cause behind the disease that converts vibrant sea stars and 24 arms into puddles of Goo.
Melanie Prentice, a research scientist at the Hakai Institute, is part of a team that has spent years investigating the cause of this disease. His research was published Monday in the magazine. Ecology and evolution of nature.
“The agent is a bacteria. It’s called Vibrio pectinicide“Prentice told CBC News.
After a decade of these creatures pushed at the edge of extinction, experts say that this is the first step in a path to recovery, not only for this species, but for critical support in the defense of humanity against climate change.
Twisted arms away
The most affected species are sunflower sea stars, which once had a range along the west coast of North America, from Baja California to Alaska.
Then, in 2013, there was a massive death due to the wear disease of the sea star.
And it is a horrible ending.
“His arms twist on themselves, so they are in pieces of puzzle,” said Alyssa Gehman, an environmental of marine diseases that is also part of the Hakai Institute research team.
Then they tend to lose their arms and then, “their arms will move away from their bodies.”
Shortly after, Gehman says that injuries are formed and sea stars dissolve and die.
The article estimates that more than 87 percent of the stars of sunflower in the northern parts of the west coast have been killed. In southern habitat ranges, the species is considered functionally extinct.
“When it happened for the first time, they were only fields and fields of puddles of the Mar Dying Goo star,” said Sara Hamilton, Oregon Kelp Alliance Sciences Coordinator. Hamilton did not participate in the investigation.
“It was like something out of a horror movie.”
The stars murderer search
Multiple theories that identify the cause do not work or were refuted.
What the team did in this case was to take healthy sea stars to the laboratory and expose them to the infection. They did this for several years to try to isolate the cause.
Gehman explained the process: “We take liquid or body tissue of a sick star and then put it experimentally in other sea stars that we know are healthy.”
The result of the document was that 92 percent of these exhibitions worked to transmit the disease to the healthy star, killing it in 20 days.
These experiments also revealed that Vibrio pectinicide It was the most likely guilty.
Experts are impressed with the diligence and effort of the newspaper.
“They not only stopped when they found a level of evidence: they went and found a second level of evidence and a third level of evidence,” said Hamilton, from Oregon Kelp Alliance.
Amanda Bates, a professor for the conservation of the ocean at the University of Victoria, also said that “there is a way, essentially that you isolate disease agents and link them to be causes of an outbreak, and this research team perfectly followed these processes.”
Hope of recovery
Knowing the cause provides hope for restoration efforts, experts say.
“Now we can leave and do tests and see the real prevalence of this pathogen in the field,” Gehman said.
In addition, any captive breeding program that tries to restore marine stars populations can now detect and test those populations before putting them again in a risky environment.
Hamilton agrees.
“That is one of the things that most worries us with some of these recovery efforts,” he said.
“If we make captive breeding and template, we certainly do not want to introduce … a new outbreak of the disease.”
The lost decade
Bates, who has seen this disease since 2009, is cautious about hurry for recovery.
“While we know that the disease impacts us as humans, I think we often forget that it affects wildlife,” he told CBC News.
“We are a decade from that great massive mortality event, and we still have no Picnopodia [sunflower sea stars] recovering in many places. ”
Hamilton said that the reintroduction of sunflower stars will be valuable due to what its absence has meant for ecosystems. The populations of sea urchin have increased, which also means that algae forests have decimated.
“Herizos are like the goats of the ocean,” he said. “They will eat anything, they simply cut things.”
Resturing the sea star means that algae forests could prosper once more. This will probably mean improvements in biodiversity, food, tourism and serve as coastal defenses against erosion and storms supercharged by climate change.
“It is definitely our ally in the climatic crisis,” Prentice said.
“I think that when we talk about the wear disease of the star of the sea, we are not only talking about the species of star of the sea, which we love in our own right, but whole marine ecosystems that have collapsed due to this epidemic.”
