© Daniel Friederichs/Picture-aliance/DPA/APDead starfish line the shore of the German island of Sylt. Mass wildlife die-offs have been interpreted as omens of an impending environmental collapse.
At first light on June 4, 2013, Steve Fradkin, a National Park Service ecologist, led a small team down a gravel strand called Beach 4 on Washington's Olympic coast. The group's destination was a rocky bench known—fatefully, it would turn out—as Starfish Point. There it would carry out an annual count of intertidal life forms as part of a long-term survey of the Pacific shore. Conditions were perfect, the sea calm beneath a blue sky dotted with cotton-ball clouds.
The day's beauty ended at Starfish Point. "It was a horror show," Fradkin told me. Instead of the usual spangling of purple, orange, and brick-red on the rocks, many of the starfish, which are known to biologists as sea stars, were contorted, marked with white lesions, or seemingly melting into goo. "They were missing arms," Fradkin said, "and there were even instances of arms walking around by themselves."
The team's observations are considered the first official record of an ongoing outbreak of a sea-star wasting disease that has killed millions of starfish from Baja California to southern Alaska, typically wiping out more than ninety per cent of each population it strikes. It's the greatest wildlife mass-mortality event, or "die-off," of the present day.
Mass-mortality events are sudden, unusual crashes in a population. On the spectrum of death—mortality's rainbow, if you will—they fill the space between the cool regularity of background death rates and the hot flare of species burning out into extinction. If you think that you are hearing about them more often these days, you're probably right. (Elizabeth Kolbert described frog and bat die-offs in a 2009 article; her subsequent book won a Pulitzer Prize this week.) Even mass-mortality experts struggle to parse whether we're witnessing a genuine epidemic (more properly, an epizootic) of these events. They have also raised another possibility: that we are in the throes of what one researcher called an "epidemic of awareness" of spooky wildlife deaths.
Comment: See also:
Six-legged calf born in Shandong, China
Bizarre deformed calf with TWO HEADS born in Moroccan mountains
Two-headed calf born in Oregon
Deformed calf 'pretty unusual'