Killer disease turns starfish to slime

Scientists are struggling to find the trigger for a disease that appears to be ravaging starfish in record numbers along the US west coast, causing the sea creatures to lose their limbs and turn to slime in a matter of days.

Marine experts will launch a survey along the coasts of California, Washington state and Oregon to determine the reach and source of the deadly syndrome, known as star wasting disease.

"It's pretty spooky because we don't have any obvious culprit for the root cause even though we know it's likely caused by a pathogen," said Pete Raimondi, of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California at Santa Cruz's Long Marine Lab.

Signs of the wasting syndrome typically begin with white lesions on the arms of the starfish that spread inward, causing the entire animal to disintegrate in less than a week, according to a monitoring report.

Starfish have suffered from the syndrome on and off for decades but have usually been reported in small numbers, isolated to southern California and linked to a rise in seawater temperatures. But that is not the case this time, Raimondi said.

Since June, wasting sea stars have been found in dozens of coastal sites ranging from southeast Alaska to Orange County, California, and the mortality rates have been higher than ever seen before, Raimondi said.