The Virus Responsible for the “Star Fish Melting” Exposed!

A large team of Canadian and American researchers claims that they have solved the mystery of the plague.

Last year, scientists observed  the outburst of a plague in the Pacific Ocean. Thousands of sea stars suffered from a mysterious illness in the summer of 2013. The disease infected almost 100 percent of its victims to a terrible death. It certainly left scientists in a state of confusion for several months since no one was aware of the cause of the deaths of starfishes. Later on, the scientists named that disease as sea-star wasting diseases

Therefore, the team of researchers performed an experiment in order to catch the virus. They accumulated sunflower sea stars from a place in Washington State. They supplied UV-treated, filtered seawater to all those sunflowers. Afterwards, they compared the tissue of infected sunflowers and the non-infected ones. The study disclosed that a complete genome of a new virus.

They placed the sunflower sea stars in different tanks, each of which was supplied with UV-treated, filtered seawater. Then they took tissue samples from infected sea stars and injected the sunflower sea stars with those potentially deadly concoctions. Some of the samples, however, had been boiled to render any viruses in them sterile.

At last, researchers found the virus which was responsible for the death of sea stars from Mexico to Alas. It was definitely a really difficult job for scientists to determine the virus since a single drop of water can carry numerous viruses. However, the researchers claimed that the virus first emerged approximately 72 years ago and infected millions of marine organisms.  The scientists named this microbe as the plague behind the ‘sea star associated densovirus”

Ian Hewson, lead author of the study informed that the figure of thousands of animals evidently indicates that the virus is linked with symptomatic sea stars.