Scientists say they have at last solved the mystery of what killed more than 5 billion sea stars off the Pacific coast of North America in a decade-long epidemic.
The culprit? Bacteria that has also infected shellfish, according to a study published Monday in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.
Now that scientists know the cause, they have a better shot at intervening to help sea stars.
Prentice said that scientists could potentially now test which of the remaining sea stars are still healthy — and consider whether to relocate them, or breed them in captivity to later transplant them to areas that have lost almost all their sunflower sea stars.
Aaaaannnnd, the bacteria thrives because of warming ocean temps, which aren’t going down anytime soon
Where are you reading that? I saw nothing in the article or linked abstract.
Poked around a bit and it seems the north Pacific is rapidly warming, but this epidemic stretches from Alaska to Mexico.
It’s kind of impossible for substantial and prolonged ocean temperature changes in one area to not eventually impact others.
I hate that I don’t have the articles at hand to post and basically am saying ‘just trust me, bro,’ but trust me, bro. I was working with a lab doing studies on oysters, because they are a common source of vibrio infection. We found about six pathogenic bacterial species of interest that were never seen before in the bays we were pulling the oysters from. The Ph.D. lab head was a little chuffed at us because the lead grad student presented on the oysters shipped to us from (I think)* the chesapeake bay and the next day he got a call from the cdc. He wasn’t happy, even though he was the one who approved the presentation. We all got a lecture about being careful because oysters are big money makers and a “pivotal part of the local economy.” Laughably (now), this was before the election last fall. That phone call was about whether the local governments should have been advised to shut down oyster farming. I can’t imagine what the phone call to the doc would be like now. Probably threats to remove references to warming waters being a contributing factor at best, more likely to be screaming about pulling all federal funding.
The big picture takeaway is that rising water temperatures globally are allowing bacteria that typically were only present in tropical waters are now being found in temperate waters in asia and both americas.
*It was somewhere near the chesapeake bay, certainly in massachusetts.
At this point in time the oceans are all warming rapidly, given that in past, as best we understand it, the composition of the atmosphere has rarely changed as much as fast as it has in the past couple hundred years, and the ocean temperatures are doing the same in that they are also changing at a pace rarely seen in the historical record. Some lucky places in the ocean are warming even faster than the overall rapid temperature change; while a pot of water on the stove might only have bubbles just starting to boil into sight only on the bottom, the whole lot is getting hot.
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1092789
Thanks! Did I miss that somewhere in the OP?