Billions of sea stars have wasted away in recent years, their crustose, spiny bodies melted to goop by a mysterious illness ...

The team initially analyzed sea star tissues before ultimately identifying elevated ... For example, sunflower sea stars eat sea urchins, which eat sea kelp. Without the sea stars to keep the sea ...

Purple sea urchins, beware: There’s a purple urchin-eating predator on the horizon — and its name is the sunflower sea star.

The region’s kelp forests were lost right along with the sea stars. In the years since, neither the sea stars or kelp have fully recovered and the urchins that eat the kelp have pressed on.

In 2013, a sea star wasting syndrome decimated populations of Pisaster along the west coast of North America and along the Monterey Peninsula in California, where this study was conducted. The ...

Starting in 2013, a mysterious sea star wasting disease sparked a mass die-off from Mexico to Alaska. The epidemic has ...

The disease is gruesome. It starts with lesions, then the sea star’s limbs begin to twist and some of them fall off completely. The creature ultimately wastes away into a pile of goo. This ...

Scientists have solved the mystery of what killed over 5 billion sea stars — also known as starfish — off the Pacific coast of North America.

In Nature Ecology & Evolution, a group of researchers reveal the cause of sea star wasting disease (SSWD). This discovery comes more than a decade after the start of the marine epidemic that has ...