Scientists are now investigating the cause of a wasting disease that afflicts starfishes both in the wild and in captivity. Starfish affected with the disease developed lesions all over their skin and their arms became unnaturally twisted.
Starfish at the Anchorage Museum have showed symptoms of the disease and a total of eight sea stars had to be euthanized during the fall. The Anchorage Daily News reported that the sea star wasting syndrome also causes those affected to lose their arms due to excessive tissue softening.
Anchorage Museum curator Greg Danner stated that the disease seemed to be under control last November. They believe that their decision to adjust the water tank temperature helped in stopping the spread of the disease.
Scientists have observed that the wasting disease is affecting a lot of sea stars in the West Coast and as far as San Diego. Professor of ecology and evolutionary biology from the University of California in Santa Cruz, Pete Raimondi, estimated that there could be millions of sea stars which are suffering from the wasting disease, Star Tribune reports.
Other researchers have noticed the prevalence of the disease on Kayak Island in the Gulf of Alaska summer of 2013. This observation debunked the theory that the disease only affects sea stars thriving on warmer climates. Raimondi's team, Pacific Rocky Intertidal Monitoring Group, was coordinating with the Sitka Sound Science center to perform surveys of the coastal biodiversity in Sitka.
Finding the disease in the waters of Sitka surprised Raimondi. He told Daily News, "It was the last place on earth where we would have expected to see it".
He theorized that the extent to which the disease affects the starfish depends on the location. For those which are living in tide pool zones, sea stars with the disease may die after a few weeks or after all the lesions became visible. For those living in underwater ecosystems, death can claim the sea star's life within hours or a day.
The researchers are scheduled to return to Sitka on March to conduct a more extensive survey of the ecosystems with the hope of knowing more about the sea wasting disease.
