Benjamin Miner

All good outbreaks run their course. A community perishes or perseveres. And purple sea stars (Pisaster ochraceus) off the Oregon coast have picked survival. They’re mounting an epic comeback, after a sea-star wasting disease decimated the marine animals in 2014. It’s no secret that…

It's been three years since millions of sea stars from Alaska to Canada and down to Baja, Mexico started wasting away into gooey white mounds. And although the destruction wrought by this disease shows no signs of stopping, the pace of the die-off has slowed. That's partly because so…

The shellfish pathogen that hit California’s Channel Islands in the 1980s began to quickly kill one of the tideland’s most important animals — black abalone.

But what unnerved scientists was what they learned next: Whenever ocean waters grew warmer, the deadly…

The efforts of volunteers across the North Olympic Peninsula have been vital in recent months as scientists work to uncover the secrets of a mysterious affliction eating its way through sea star populations up and down the West Coast.

“Citizen scientists” have braved slippery rocks along…

Many openings remain for free summertime programs and classes for all ages at the Breazeale Interpretive Center, part of the Padilla Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve in coastal Skagit County.

Most classes for "junior ecologists" in the 6- to 9-year…

In their waterproof orange overalls, Hannah Perlkin and Emily Tucker look like commercial fishermen or storm-ready sailors. But they are biologists on their way to tide pools along a remote stretch of northern California coast. There they are searching for the cause of a mysterious and…

From Alaska to Southern California, something is killing the West Coast’s sea stars ­– the ubiquitous, child-friendly favorite of tide-pool explorers everywhere –­ and nobody knows why.

Yet.

Benjamin Miner, as associate professor of Biology at Western Washington University, has…