(Not sure if this is related, but sure seems like the diversion of heat has something to do with it.)
The race to stop starfish from melting into goo
A mysterious disease causing sea stars to waste away isn’t just a disaster for the aquatic invertebrates. It may end up making climate change worse, too.
The first hint that climate change might be playing a role came by accident. Maintenance staff at a University of Washington lab mistakenly turned off a valve to an outdoor tank with sunflower stars.
“It was a sunny afternoon,” said Drew Harvell, a marine ecologist at Cornell. With no cool water, the temperature in the tank spiked — and the starfish began wasting away. “That, to us, was a clue.”
In a 2019 paper, Harvell and her colleagues showed that declines of sunflower sea stars in the Pacific peaked after marine heat waves, suggesting rising ocean temperatures made the epidemic worse.
She still believes a strain of bacteria, virus or other pathogen is the root cause of the disease. “There are many cases where infectious diseases are worse under warming conditions,” she said.
But Ian Hewson, another marine ecologist at Cornell, thinks wasting isn’t caused by an infection at all. His own recent experiments suggest a change in the environment — specifically, a spike in nutrients that fueled bacteria growth and lowered oxygen levels around seas stars — may be responsible for the outbreak.
“It’s not a definitive, smoking-gun cause,” he said. “It’s our best guess as to what was going on.”
Regardless of the causes of starfish wasting, we are already seeing the effects of losing the sunflower star. As it disappears, the sea urchins it once preyed on have run riot, decimating the kelp that make up massive submarine jungles that provide food and shelter to hundreds of species.
The towering organisms also sequester carbon, mitigating climate change. Their blades slow ocean currents, helping prevent coastal erosion, and are home to abalone and other commercially valuable species."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/03/04/sea-star-wasting-disease-starfish/Disease epidemic and a marine heat wave are associated with the continental-scale collapse of a pivotal predator
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aau7042