Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. While they have no backbone, sunflower sea stars (Pycnopodia ...

The sunflower sea star—which can span more than three feet across—is a ravenous, roving apex predator able to devour armored animals like urchins, snails, clams, and crabs. But a mysterious wasting ...

Purple sea urchins, beware: There’s a purple urchin-eating predator on the horizon — and its name is the sunflower sea star. That’s the plot line coming from a small upstart research facility in Moss ...

Ashley Kidd signed onto the Zoom call a few minutes late, giddily explaining that 12 minutes ago there was an unexpected development in a planned spawn of critically endangered starfish. Kidd, ...

Scientists say they’ve found the cause of a marine epidemic more than 10 years after it started. What took so long?

In Nature Ecology & Evolution, a group of researchers reveal the cause of sea star wasting disease (SSWD). This discovery comes more than a decade after the start of the marine epidemic that has ...

Scientists say they have at last solved the mystery of what killed more than 5 billion sea stars — often known as starfish — off the Pacific coast of North America in a decade-long epidemic. Starting ...

Before 2013, divers on North America's west coast rarely saw purple sea urchins. The spiky animals, which are voracious kelp ...

In this photo provided by the Hakai Institute, researcher Alyssa Gehman from the Hakai Institute counts and measures sunflower sea stars in the Burke Channel on the Central Coast of British Columbia, ...

Researchers have discovered the cause of a mysterious marine epidemic that has turned billions of sea stars into goo along the West Coast — and it's not what they expected. Sea star wasting disease ...

Identifying a pathogen responsible for wasting brings hope for P. helianthoides, says Ian Hewson, a marine ecologist at Cornell University. The study may be good news for rearing sunflower sea stars ...