
Massive Starfish Die-Off Baffles Scientists
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And even crazier comments at the end. :crazy:
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I'd been reading about this for the last few months.
It seems that one could almost rule out pollution and or chemical causes because if it were at high enough levels to kill starfish at this rate, other organisms would be affected also.
I would guess it's a pathogen. Perhaps a virus that came in the bilge of a ship? There was a similar case with a big die off of the black sea urchin in the Caribbean and Atlantic back in the 1980s.
We have learned a lot about viruses in shrimp over the last 20 years. But there is a lot of money at stake in the shrimp industry so there is support. Starfish and urchins….well, no one is making a lot of money off them. It takes up to two years to develop markers used to identify new virus strains. We spent over $30,000 in 2004-06 identifying Penaeus Vannamei Nodavirus, one that hit us here in 2004.
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Very interesting
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