“When the team heated ground-up tissue and bodily fluids from sick stars to kill pathogens before injecting the mixture into healthy stars, none got sick.”
Six billion sea stars dead since 2013. The culprit is Vibrio pectenicida, a bacterium that thrives in warmer waters. The investigation reads like a detective story. Scientists ruled out virus after virus before finding the real killer. The cascade effects include kelp forest collapse and fishery crashes. Climate change weaponizes bacteria.