Nov 18, 2014 10:52 AM EST By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

A massive die-off in starfish on the U.S. West Coast may be attributed to a virus that normally infects insects.

According to the Associated Press, the condition is known as sea star wasting syndrome and it withers the animals' skin with lesions until its limbs fall off and the body decays. In their study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers found 20 different sea star species to have been affected.

For San Diego County, there have been no new sea star wasting cases since June and scientists from numerous institutions have not been able to give an update.

"There are 10 million viruses in a drop of seawater, so discovering the virus associated with a marine disease can be like looking for a needle in a haystack," study lead author Ian Hewson, a professor of microbiology at Cornell University, told the AP. "We compared healthy to diseased tissues, and the only virus we found that was different was densovirus.

"We took the virus-sized material from diseased sea stars and injected it into healthy sea stars in aquariums and looked for the disease to appear."

Study co-author Peter Raimondi, professor and chair of ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz, said the virus was noticed in sea star specimen in museums from 1942.

"The fact that it has occurred historically indicates that while this virus may be the agent that causes the disease, something may have happened recently that caused it to go rogue, because we've never seen anything like the current outbreak," he said in a press release. "Right now we are seeing renewed outbreaks in areas of the Olympic Coast, where it hadn't been very bad before, but now it's hitting with a vengeance.

"If sea urchins are a nonsymptomatic reservoir for the virus, this might be a prolonged outbreak unless sea stars are able to develop immunity."

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