After looking at this site and reading about the wasting disease, I wonder if the orange blobs that we saw on the Scripps pier's pylons were sea stars. They are the right color for our area. They keep studying about it but don't seem to have found any remedy.
These are unfortunately fuzzy enlargements. We went back to the pier today to see if we could get good closeups but the pylons bases were under water.
Photo credits: Christy Bell (left), Rachael Williams (right).
Sea stars along much of the North American Pacific coast are dying in great numbers from a mysterious wasting syndrome. Similar die-offs have occurred before in the 1970s, 80s, and the 90s, but never before at this magnitude and over such a wide geographic area. Pisaster ochraceus and many other species of sea stars have been affected by the current sea star wasting syndrome event. The following paper by Hewson et al. “Densovirus associated with sea-star wasting disease and mass mortality” provides evidence for a link between a densovirus (SSaDV) and sea star wasting syndrome (SSWS) but there is still much work to be done before this mysterious disease is fully understood.
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