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 ...

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

The disease is gruesome. It starts with lesions, then the sea star’s limbs begin to twist and some of them fall off completely. The creature ultimately wastes away into a pile of goo. This terrifying ...

I see my first sunflower sea star in a plastic container barely large enough to hold a sandwich. It’s eating lunch. I am in a garagelike government laboratory on the curled tip of Washington state’s ...

In the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, a group of researchers reveals the culprit behind sea star wasting disease, a marine epidemic that has decimated sea star populations along the west coast of ...

After years of scientific sleuthing, a team of West Coast researchers reported that they have identified a particular strain of ocean bacteria that has killed more than 6 billion sea stars since 2013.

More than a decade after a mysterious sickness began killing billions of sea stars off the Pacific Coast, scientists say they've identified the bacteria that causes the deadly disease. A team of at ...

Rebecca Vega Thurber does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations ...