Article content

VANCOUVER — Last month, a diver alerted Vancouver Aquarium staff that he had found a number of dead and decaying sunflower sea stars in the cold Pacific waters of a popular dive spot just off the shore of West Vancouver.

Within weeks, the tentacled orange sea stars had all but disappeared in Howe Sound and Vancouver Harbour, disintegrating where they sat on the ocean floor.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Aquarium alarmed after starfish around Vancouver disintegrate in 'wildfire' mass die-off Back to video

And aquarium staff don’t know just how far-reaching the “alarming” epidemic has been, and whether this and other sea star species will recover.

“They’re gone. It’s amazing,” said Donna Gibbs, a research diver and taxonomist on the aquarium’s Howe Sound Research and Conservation group.

“Whatever hit them, it was like wildfire and just wiped them out.”

The sunflower sea star population had inexplicably exploded in recent years. In some areas they were stacked several stars deep, and those conditions may have been ripe for disease, she said.