Last year, sea urchins in the Caribbean started getting sick — shedding their spines, dying off and throwing reef ecosystems into chaos. Now, scientists think they’ve caught the killer in this marine murder mystery.
— shedding their spines, dying off and throwing reef ecosystems into chaos. Now, scientists think they’ve caught the killer in this marine murder mystery.
But in January 2022, these animals started showing strange symptoms — their sharp spines drooping and falling off, their suction-cup feet losing their grip — before dying off in droves, from the Virgin Islands to Puerto Rico to Florida. They didn’t see signs of viruses or bacteria, said study author Ian Hewson, who researches marine diseases at Cornell University. But they did spot traces of tiny single-celled organisms called ciliates, which only showed up in the sick urchins.
It's possible that this same parasite also caused the die-off in the 1980s, but scientists can’t be sure, Breitbart said.
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