Biology Department

It’s an iconic summertime image in the Northwest: children playing on the shoreline at low tide, shoveling sand into plastic pails while purple and orange sea stars cling to exposed rocks nearby.
On some beaches this summer, that scene likely will be missing the sea stars.

Starfish off the United States coastline are ripping off their own appendages and dying in their thousands.

The Blaze reports that the spectacle on the North American Pacific coast is baffling scientists.

The mass die-off is leaving…

Near the ferry docks on Puget Sound, a group of scientists and volunteer divers shimmy into suits and double-check their air tanks.

They move with the urgency of a group on a mission. And they are. They’re trying to solve a marine mystery.

Something strange is happening in Seattle’s waters. Laura James was one of the first to notice. She alerted scientists when starfish began washing up on the shores near her home.

Something is killing starfish up and down the West Coast and no one knows what.

A mysterious illness that first appeared in June in Washington state has now spread from Sitka, Alaska, to San Diego. Starfish first waste away and then "turn into goo," divers say. Whatever is…

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…