Jayson Smith scours Crystal Cove’s rocky shoreline for sea stars, or starfish – and the search is getting harder every week.
In October, there were 191 sea stars at this reef, just south of the historic cottages that line the state park’s cliffs. Smith, a marine biologist from Cal Poly Pomona, has been monitoring this site since his graduate student days back in 1996.
In March, there were 11. Saturday, Smith only finds one.
The reason is sea star wasting syndrome, an outbreak that has resulted in the demise of hundreds of thousands of starfish along the Pacific coastline ranging from Sitka, Alaska, to Mexico’s Coronado Islands.
So far, scientists have been unable to pinpoint a cause for the massive die-off, which is the most extensive sea star wasting event on record, extending farther geographically and hitting more species of sea stars than any other occurrence.
The disease started showing up last summer in Washington state, where sea stars began developing lesions, or white marks on their bodies. Once infected, sea stars lose their rigidity, start to discard their limbs and literally pull themselves apart in the course of a few hours. Piles of white ooze often mark the areas a sea star once inhabited.
In the fall, the disease wiped out massive colonies in Northern California, and by February, Southern California had been hit just as hard.
At the four locations regularly monitored in Orange County, total counts of sea stars went from 921 in the fall to 12 by April.
But Smith is only looking for sea stars in the intertidal zones, meaning the shallow, rocky reef areas that are exposed during low tides, creating the tide pools and little oceanic dioramas that provide small snapshots of sea life.
In deeper water, or the subtidal zone, sea stars are reportedly no better off. Amanda Bird, marine restoration coordinator with Orange County Coastkeeper, dives two to three times a week at spots like Dana Point, Laguna Beach’s Shaw’s Cove, and Newport Beach’s Little Corona State Beach. Since February, she’s seen the same demise of the sea stars.
“In a span of about two weeks, it went from healthy-looking sea stars to some missing limbs and some just dissolving,” Bird said. “By March, I’ve been basically just seeing skeletons.”
UC Santa Cruz marine biologist Melissa Miner said Bird’s observations are similar to those of divers monitoring up and down the coast.
“We’re seeing that in most cases, the subtidal zones are hit first, and often harder than the intertidal zones,” Miner said.
Miner has been working with UC Santa Cruz professor Pete Raimondi, leader of the Pacific Rocky Intertidal Monitoring Program, which has been documenting the disease at sites up and down the coast.
So far, sea stars at 68 of the group’s 106 sites have been found to have signs of sea star wasting syndrome.
AQUARIUMS ON ALERT
The spread has even reached the state’s aquariums, with die-offs reported in both Monterey Bay Aquarium and Long Beach’s Aquarium of the Pacific.
“In November last year, we had to start pulling out the animals and euthanizing them,” said Mike Murray, veterinarian at Monterey Bay.
The aquarium pumps in and circulates sea water through its exhibits from the bay, and larvae from marine organisms come in with it.
Apparently, the sea star wasting syndrome came through the system as well, infecting more than 100 sea stars. Now under control, Murray is constantly on the lookout for sick starfish.
“We’re worried about this being an infectious disease that could spread to other organisms in our exhibits,” Murray said.
In Long Beach, the aquarium’s water is shipped in and treated before going into its exhibits, but so are the sea stars. In September, about a dozen new stars were placed in an exhibit, and were soon found to have sea star wasting symptoms. Aquarium curator Dudley Wigdahl said the animals were placed in quarantine before others were infected and died shortly after.
CAUSE IS A CONUNDRUM
While the disease continues to spread, scientists continue to work toward what is causing the outbreak.
Historically, sea star wasting events have coincided with warm water spells brought on by El Niño events that typically affected starfish ranging from Southern California south to Baja, Mexico. But this time, it appears to be working in the opposite direction.
Jack Engle, a marine biologist at UC Santa Barbara’s Marine Science Institute, recalled the 1978 sea star wasting event as “deja vu” to this year’s, but in almost reverse order.
“This one is almost acting the opposite of the 1978 event that hit Southern California,” Engle said. “Instead of starting in Southern California’s warm water, it started up north in the summer, and actually increased through the winter months.”
At UC Santa Cruz, Raimondi has a twofold hypothesis: the sea stars are weakened by an agent, or what’s referred to as an “insult to the physiology of an organism,” which leaves the echinoderms susceptible to infections that they would otherwise be able to fight off.
“So they get a flu, basically, and are unable to fight it off; and once it gets to a certain threshold, it reaches an epidemic level and can be carried by the water currents up and down the coast,” Raimondi said.
Trying to figure out what is weakening the starfish to begin with is a tough determination, but the infiltration of the disease into California’s aquariums led Cornell microbiology professor Ian Hewson to investigate whether a water-borne microorganism is behind the disease.
But pinpointing an exact virus, bacteria or parasite in a sea star, which is constantly pumping sea water through its hydraulic vascular system, has proven difficult.
With millions of bacteria and viruses running through their veins, Hewson is continuing his research, but no single determining factor has been discovered, and the results could lead to finding that multiple disease agents are behind the sea star deaths.
MORE BAD NEWS
While this outbreak of sea star wasting syndrome did not coincide with a warm water event, that doesn’t mean an El Niño couldn’t perpetuate it.
In past sea star wasting events, Engle found that removing sea stars from the warmer waters and placing them in cold water actually stopped the disease.
Raimondi said that the warm water could cause the pathogen to reproduce more quickly, or become more virulent for sea stars than it already is. And with scientists predicting an El Niño event this year, it could exacerbate the event even further.
CIRCLE OF LIFE?
With the doom and gloom mounting on sea stars, Raimondi recently encountered a ray of light right in his own backyard: baby star fish.
“At Terrace Point, right behind UC Santa Cruz, we saw the population fall from 200 starfish to six last year, and now we have the most baby starfish we’ve ever seen,” Raimondi said.
With the adults out of the way, juvenile starfish are flourishing, possibly from the lack of competition for food from their adult counterparts, and also likely due to the cannibalistic nature of the sea star.
The babies aren’t popping up everywhere the disease has hit, but Raimondi is encouraged by the recent findings.
“It’s remarkable, and shows the hardiness and resiliency of the species,” Raimondi said. “Maybe there will be a quicker replenishment than we expected.”
Contact the writer: thill@ocregister.com or 714-796-2468
