The cause of the wasting symptom is still unknown, that's why the link in the article leads to a school that is looking for specimens to analyze.

It would be very surprising, to me at least, to find ultimately humans did not contribute to this chain of events. Whether it's something like microplastics causing the lesions on the star fish or water temperature/chemical concentration leading to some fungal spore growing, I suspect ancient kelp forests aren't vanishing without our help.

This is an entirely different point than mine about harvest.

It is entirely possible it is in some way related to human activity. It is also possible that it is completely unrelated. Booms, busts, and radical ecosystem changes do happen all the time in nature.

They do, it’s true, but not on the time horizon that we have been seeing in the last 50 years which seems to be speeding up

That's not true at all.

Nature isn't gradual, it's catastropic. The Younger Drayas caused a 7° to 10° C drop worldwide in a matter of decades.

Volcanic eruptions, sudden drought, earthquakes, asteroid impacts, abrupt population crashes: sudden change is normal.

Yes, a lot of the change we see now is human impact. But this could easily be a virus that hit the sea stars out of the blue. We just don't know.

As a man of a science background, nothing is impossible it's just highly unlikely.

If you've been watching the changes in the aquatic habitat and the sea life populations they becoming simple / basic and more homogeneous as a function of changing water temperatures (and harvesting of sea life without the ability to replenish).

I won't disagree that it is possible virus or range of other possibility - I am not providing an answer. However it's a very high probability that the natural ability for that ecosystem to defend against the virus (if it was) was likely impeded by human impacts which change the water temperature and the species of life that live in that area.

We could posit many different theories, the fact is that nature is changing rapidly under our watch and to insinuate that it is a natural occurrence is disengeinuine and irresponsible at best and seems to be the push of a false narrative to undermine the consensus in the scientific community.

How do we know that? I’m not disagreeing with you- but I can’t imagine any historic evidence could rule out the existence of a highly volatile and cyclical population change.

Just to be clear, almost every species that has ever existed has gone extinct. And almost all of that has happened before humans existed.

That being said, it's almost definitely due to humans, I just wanted to be pedantic.

I think that mindset is what has led us to the current predicament we're now facing.

We have to understand the connection between a seemingly "innocent" event such as throwing trash in a random place and something else happening thousands of miles away - the events can be interconnected and the various documentaries have been trying to make us think about that.

If our activity causes warming that causes more storms that causes species to migrate earlier to different parts of the globe than usual that causes unpredictable food for other animals which they were relying on and have done for years, which in turn means they can't reproduce or sustain their cubs meaning other animals might suffer as a result and suddenly the entire chain is broken, disjointed and collapses.

Humans have no idea how fragile the ecosystem is or how resilient it may be (since we've never had this many humans living at once, consuming at the rates we are and causing the warming we've been witnessing).

The fact that events can sometimes have unintuitive consequences does not make it rational to claim two random things are connected and ignore all the science we do have.

The sea star wasting may be tied to global warming or not and there are some plausible hypothesis. That said, there is no credible theory which ties it to overfishing.

The size of the sea otter population is almost certainly a result of human activity. In particular the fur trade and fisheries.

We're pretty bad at managing wild resources, but then again, we're pretty bad at saving them as well. For example, the same marine mammal act which saved sea otters from extinction has also allowed for the overpopulation of harbor seals which is going to drive the southern resident orcas into extinction. And the fisheries systems that we've built to save salmon and steelhead populations have resulted in less genetic diversity in wild populations that make them more susceptible to disease and predation. Not that I have an answer to this, just a little frustrated that we didn't care about this stuff sooner, and had a more developed body of science on how to deal with these things.

Do you have a source for the effect on Orca?

I don't see anything about Orcas there. Am I missing something?

The article mentions orcas slightly, but it is more about the effect of the marine mammal act on salmon populations. The effect on orcas is mostly implied, it is fairly well known that decreased availability of their primary food source (salmon) is causing their near extinction.

Here's another, if you're curious

https://www.nwnewsnetwork.org/post/hey-seals-and-sea-lions-q...

Yes, but otters don’t particularly care to eat urchins.

I can confidently say that I personally saw a sea otter about 15 miles north of Santa Barbara about 5 months ago that was snacking on purple sea urchins. It would go down, come up, do something, and repeat, and I came across several very-recently-eaten purple urchins washed up along the beach on my walk that morning.

I also pretty regularly collect urchins in that kelp forest, purple and red in that area, and the ones the otter were taking were smaller than the ones I would have chosen. So, at the least, there's at least one sea otter that particularly cares to each some sea urchins, and one human that cares to each the others.

They do, just not emaciated zombie urchins.

It is a bottom tier food source and like you say, they don’t like the evacuated ones present in an urchin barren