What's Going On In Our Waters? The Coastal Climate Crisis.

Until a couple of years ago coastal British Columbia had masses of purple starfish. Then something wiped them out.

Sea star wasting disease hit hard and fast. The disease arrived on the central coast of British Columbia in 2015 and rapidly killed 96 percent of the sunflower sea stars in the region. The disease exacted a similar toll on a range of other sea star species along the northeast Pacific coast. Jenn Burt, a doctoral candidate at Simon Fraser University and a Hakai Institute scholar,* was shocked by the carnage she witnessed. 

“When we showed up in the summer of 2015 to do our annual surveys, there were melted sea stars everywhere,” says Burt. “You would be literally swimming on a transect line and you’d come across single sea star arms.”

...Sea otters selectively hunt the largest sea urchins. Sea stars, however, go after the small and medium ones. In the absence of sea stars, Burt saw a proliferation of smaller urchins. These urchins, now unrestrained by predation, ate away at the kelp. As a result, the kelp forests suffered. With the SSWD epidemic, the annual survival rate of small and medium sea urchins increased by 166 percent. The density of affected kelp forests, meanwhile, declined by 30 percent.

It has been reported in recent months that Vancouver Island's kelp forests are coming under attack by massive numbers of urchins.

Tens of millions of voracious purple sea urchins that have already chomped their way through towering underwater kelp forests in California are spreading north to Oregon, sending the delicate marine ecosystem off the shore into such disarray that other critical species are starving to death. It's similar to what has been reported in B.C. 

A recent count found 350 million purple sea urchins on one Oregon reef alone — a more than 10,000 per cent increase since 2014. And in northern California, 90 per cent of the giant bull kelp forests have been devoured by the urchins, perhaps never to return. 

Vast "urchin barrens" — stretches of denuded seafloor dotted with nothing but hundreds of the spiny orbs — have spread to coastal Oregon, where kelp forests were once so thick it was impossible to navigate some areas by boat.

Now the climate crisis is believed to be the main cause of a deadly virus sweeping through sea mammals - sea lions, seals and otters - in the North Pacific.

A lethal virus that killed tens of thousands of harbor seals in the northern Atlantic in 2002 suddenly spread to sea lions, seals and otters in the northern Pacific Ocean two years later, confusing scientists, as NBC News reported. 

How could the pathogen that causes a measles-like disease in marine mammals that had only been found on the Atlantic coasts suddenly have spread to the Pacific? 

"We didn't understand how a virus from the Atlantic ended up in these sea otters. It's not a species that ranges widely," said Tracey Goldstein, a scientist at the University of California Davis who investigates how pathogens move through marine ecosystems, as National Geographic reported. 

Goldstein and her colleagues looked at 15 years of data and realized that the spike in the virus was commensurate with Arctic sea ice loss. The data, published in a new study in the journal Scientific Reports, finds that the loss of Arctic sea ice allowed otters and other mammals to move west and spread the virus. The study shows that global heating is opening new avenues for diseases to spread, as National Geographic reported. 

"The loss of sea ice is leading marine wildlife to seek and forage in new habitats and removing that physical barrier, allowing for new pathways for them to move," said Goldstein in a press release. "As animals move and come in contact with other species, they carry opportunities to introduce and transmit new infectious disease, with potentially devastating impacts."

The devastation of local otter populations and the starfish could explain the attack by urchins on our kelp forests. Otters feed on the urchins, keeping their populations under control and thereby safeguarding the kelp from their main predator.

This past week the New York Times reported on a contagious form of cancer attacking shellfish. The article claims the cancer is believed to have originated in bay mussels from British Columbia.  This cancer virus has now been found in mussels and clams in South America and in blue mussels in France. No one seems to know how this ends, what's next. All I know is that the federal Pacific headquarters of Fisheries and Oceans is in no rush to return my calls.

So what is Mr. Trudeau's Liberal government doing about this? Apparently nothing beyond squabbling with a gaggle of dryland premiers about a hopelessly gestural carbon tax as he falls even further behind meeting Stephen Harper's emissions targets.

We know salmon stocks are in decline. We know the orca can't find enough food and are at risk. Ottawa's response - let's build a new pipeline and launch an armada of supertankers onto the BC coast.

The study adds to a growing body of research signaling trouble for marine mammals, including an increase in marine heat waves that deplete their food supply and an increase in toxic algal blooms that can infect fish with a toxin that causes brain damage in marine mammals, as NBC News reported. 

"When we see these changes happening in animals, we can't ignore them, because the impacts on people and the planet are not far behind," said Elizabeth VanWormer, the study's lead author, as NBC News reported. "This shows how interconnected these things are — the health of people, animals and the planet."

Starfish, mussels, clams, otters, seals and sea lions all form links in the marine ecosystem. That ecosystem is now breaking down. No one knows how this ends.

This is coming on hard and fast and Ottawa is asleep at the switch. The message is clear. When climate change comes hammering on your door, you are on your own.