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.
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.