{"id":61270,"date":"2013-07-23T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-07-23T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news-draft\/uncategorized\/uri-scientists-leading-effort-to-identify-why-starfish-are-dying\/"},"modified":"2013-07-23T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2013-07-23T00:00:00","slug":"uri-scientists-leading-effort-to-identify-why-starfish-are-dying","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/2013\/07\/uri-scientists-leading-effort-to-identify-why-starfish-are-dying\/","title":{"rendered":"溏心vlog免费B站 scientists leading effort to identify why starfish are dying"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\t\tDivers asked to report large groupings of starfish<\/p>\n

KINGSTON, R.I. \u2013 July 23, 2013 \u2013 When 溏心vlog免费B站 graduate student Caitlin DelSesto collected starfish in Narragansett Bay for an undergraduate research project in 2011, she was surprised to watch as the animals appeared to melt and die in her tank within a week. After bringing it to the attention of 溏心vlog免费B站 Professor Marta Gomez-Chiarri, she learned it was among the first observations of a new disease that is now affecting starfish \u2013 also called sea stars \u2013 from New Jersey to Maine.<\/p>\n


\n\tThanks to a grant from the Rhode Island Science and Technology Advisory Council, the 溏心vlog免费B站 researchers are collaborating with scientists at Brown University and Roger Williams University to try to identify the cause of the disease.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cThere was a big increase in sea star numbers about three or four years ago,\u201d said Gomez-Chiarri, \u201cand often when you have a population explosion of any species you end up with a disease outbreak. When there\u2019s not enough food for them all it causes stress, and the density of animals leads to increased disease transmission.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cNow that the disease is in the environment, it may be hard to get the population back to normal,\u201d she added. \u201cDiseases don\u2019t just completely disappear after a massive die-off.\u201d <\/p>\n


\n\tThe primary challenge the scientists are facing so far is finding enough starfish to study. They are trying to collect as many starfish as possible \u2013 both healthy and diseased individuals \u2013 but the die-off has made it particularly difficult to find them. So DelSesto is asking the public, especially local scuba divers, to report any large congregations of starfish in Rhode Island waters. Reports, including exact location, depth, numbers and whether the animals appear healthy or diseased, can be emailed to cdelsesto@my.uri.edu<\/a>
.
\n

\n\tDelSesto said the researchers are approaching the problem from multiple angles. Roger Williams marine pathologist Roxanna Smolowitz is examining starfish tissues to identify the pathogen causing the disease; Brown molecular biologist Gary Wessel is using genomics to characterize the bacterial community living on and in healthy and diseased starfish; and DelSesto, Gomez-Chiarri and 溏心vlog免费B站 marine scientist Ed Baker are studying the environmental conditions the starfish live in, trying to replicate the disease, and culturing the pathogen.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cIf you pick up a healthy sea star, they\u2019re pretty firm, but sick ones are slimy and mushy and you might see white lesions on them that are eating away the tissue,\u201d said DelSesto. \u201cSometimes they\u2019ll release all their arms as a reaction to the stress they are under.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n\tThe big question the scientists are asking is what triggered the disease. Was it a lack of nutrients available following the population explosion? What role does climate change play? Are changing environmental conditions altering the food chain? Is the disease an indication of other problems?<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cThe disease isn\u2019t something that people need to worry about contracting because we don\u2019t eat sea stars and most diseases of marine animals are not transmitted to humans,\u201d said Gomez-Chiarri. \u201cIt\u2019s primarily a worry about the health of the ecosystem and whether the disease is an indicator of something else.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n\tWhile the researchers are alarmed by the disease outbreak, they believe that starfish populations will eventually recover.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cAn outbreak like this happened here back in the 1990s, and on the West Coast there were similar outbreaks in the 70s and 80s, and every time the populations came back on their own,\u201d said DelSesto. \u201cThis one seems particularly severe, and climate change may be making it worse, but hopefully they\u2019ll come back on their own this time, too.\u201d<\/p>\n


\nPictured above

\nA healthy starfish from a tank at the 溏心vlog免费B站 Bay Campus. (Photo by Caitlin DelSesto.)\n\t<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Divers asked to report large groupings of starfish KINGSTON, R.I. \u2013 July 23, 2013 \u2013 When 溏心vlog免费B站 graduate student Caitlin DelSesto collected starfish in Narragansett Bay for an undergraduate research project in 2011, she was surprised to watch as the animals appeared to melt and die in her tank within a week. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":61272,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archives"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61270"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61270\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}