Mystery Illness That "Melts" Starfish Identified [View all]

[zappaman]

Since 2013, millions of sea stars from at least 20 species have been suffering devastating losses up and down the Pacific Coast between Alaska and Baja California -- and in a very gruesome way. It starts with inflammation and tissue ulcers and decay, and eventually their limbs pull away from their bodies, organs ooze through their skin, and they disintegrate and die. The extensive range and the number of species infected by this sea star wasting disease makes it one of the largest marine wildlife diseases ever, yet the cause is a mystery. Now, researchers may have pinpointed the deadly culprit: a densovirus that’s been festering at low levels since at least 1942. The findings were published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week.

“There are 10 million viruses in a drop of seawater, so discovering the virus associated with a marine disease can be like looking for a needle in a haystack,” Cornell's Ian Hewson says in a statement. “Not only is this an important discovery of a virus involved in a mass mortality of marine invertebrates, but this is also the first virus described in a sea star.”

Hewson and colleagues studied healthy and infected sea stars during field surveys, and they also conducted laboratory infection studies where healthy sea stars were exposed to material from diseased sea stars -- which resulted in the onset of disease. A metagenomic analysis revealed that a previously unknown virus was the most prevalent contagious element contained in the material. They call it the sea star associated densovirus (SSaDV).

More at link
http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/virus-suspected-gruesome-sea-star-die-offs