A Starfish-Killing Disease Is Remaking the Oceans
The voracious sunflower starfish was once as common as a robin, but a new disease has almost wiped it out—with wide-ranging consequences.
“There were arms everywhere,” Drew Harvell recalls. “It looked like a blast zone.”
It was 2013, eight days before Christmas. Harvell and her colleagues were walking along Seattle’s Alki Beach, sweeping their headlamps over wet gravel exposed by a receding tide. Wherever they looked, they saw dead and dying sea stars. Some had disintegrated into white mush. Others were still alive, their body riddled with sores and their arms twisting at grotesque angles. Yet others seemed to be pulling themselves apart. “There were arms separating from sea stars, arms walking off by themselves,” says , an ecologist at Cornell University who studies marine diseases. “That was
