Katie_Campbell

A network of scientists on both coasts received rapid response funding from the National Science Foundation to investigate the die-offs. It’s one of the fastest-ever mobilizations of research around a marine epidemic. Diver Laura James and I have been following the infectiousness experiments that they're conducting here in Puget Sound. They're also taking samples from dying starfish up and down the west coast to send to a lab at Cornell University. They're using DNA sequencing and metagenomics to analyze the samples for viruses as well as bacteria and other protozoa in order to pinpoint the infectious agent among countless possibilities. It really is like a matrix, but from what scientists are telling us, they're homing in on the cause and may be able to make an announcement in a few months. We'll be sure to follow up.

The short answer is almost definitely no. Scientists do not see a connection between the massive die-offs of starfish along the Pacific shores of North America and Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster. Here are some reasons why: 1. Recent tests for radiation in seawater along the west coast have found “no detectable Fukushima cesium.” While small amounts of radioactive have reached the west coast, the largest concentration of radioactive water released during the nuclear meltdown is still moving across the Pacific. Scientists predict that the radiation plume will reach the west coast of the United States by around April 2014. 2. The die-offs are patchy. This doesn’t line up with a giant plume of radiation moving across the Pacific. They’re popping up in certain places like Seattle and Santa Barbara and not in others, such as coastal Oregon, where there’s only been one report. 3. Sites closer to the Pacific shorelines are being affected sooner than places farther out to sea. And there have not been reports of starfish die-offs in Hawaii or Japan. If Fukushima were the cause, it would stand to reason that starfish closer to the source would also be impacted. 4. Sea star wasting syndrome predates the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Some of the earliest accounts of sea star wasting took place in the late 1990s. The Fukushima nuclear disaster happened in March 2011.

For this die-off to involve 12 different species dying rapidly across such a large latitudinal scale makes this an event scientists haven't seen before. That's why they're making it a high priority to understand both how it started, how it’s propagating, what the rates of transmission are and what kinds of infectious agents might be involved.

As I wrote the script for the video, I decided not to raise the issue of Fukushima because all the research I'd conducted through extensive interviews with scientists lead me to feel that raising this issue would be directing too much attention to an issue that scientists had largely ruled out. Fukushima felt like a red herring. However, once the video was released, hundreds of commenters have declared that the die-offs must be caused by Fukushima. So I've been trying to follow up and explain further why scientists don't believe this is the likely cause. Here's the latest article I wrote.

Good questions... Tracking marine diseases is extremely difficult because anything underwater is out of sight and out of mind. We know significantly less about how marine disease travel compared to land-based diseases. And we have little way of knowing exactly when sea stars get sick because as far as we know, they get sick when people start noticing. However, there are a number of groups that conduct regular surveys and this is helping to establish a baseline. For example, there are groups such as the SeaDoc Society and REEF who have divers trying to keep an eye out for these things. A group from the University of California Santa Cruz has also been conducting intertidal surveys of sea star wasting and posting their reports of sea star wasting to this map. Their earliest report of sea star wasting from this most recent series of die-offs was June 2013 on the WA coast.