People began to notice these lovable creatures displaying some very disturbing behavior
We've been filmed actually pulling off their own arms people have seen arms basically crawling away from the body
This behavior has spread along the whole Pacific coast from Alaska to Mexico
And at least 20 different species of sea star are tearing themselves to pieces
losing limbs left right and center
And if that's not unsettling enough that attached arms then seem to take on a life of their own
They're almost like zombies
So what's taken over these adorable invertebrates and turned them into the Walking Dead?
Well there are over 2,000 species of sea star worldwide
Many of them have the familiar five arms, but they can have many more like this massive meter-wide sunflower starfish
Arranged around a central disc every limb is identical and contains their vital organs
Their underside is covered in flexible tube feet that they use to move around the seabed and pass food into their mouths
Despite having no brain or bones sea stars have some amazing superpowers
For a start they can see with their arms each limb has an eye spot, that's sensitive to light
they can also spit out their stomach wrap it around their prey to dissolve it and then to digest it but
What's driving these sea stars to pull themselves apart
Melissa Redfield and her colleagues at the University of California and Santa Cruz are trying to figure out. What's going on?
Sea stars losing their arms all over the place and crawling away is pretty terrifying
If you imagine that that was some sort of animal on lands losing its arm and crawling away
You know it would be quite frightening and a lot more obvious than what's going on out in the ocean
Although it looks scary
Several animals including lizards and slow worms can remove parts of their body with no ill effects if threatened by a predator
they quickly shed their tails to avoid getting caught it's called otter Tomi and
Sea stars have a similar ability if one of their limbs is nabbed by a predator. They can simply regrow a new one
In fact they can lose up to three-quarters of their body and still survive
Some sea stars have taken this one step further you see as long as a small portion of the central disc remains
They can completely regenerate from a single arm
But this doesn't explain the strange phenomenon on the west coast of America
These starfish are dropping their arms with no sign of danger nearby
Well sea stars have one final trick up their sleeve a
few species reproduce this way simply splitting in half to make two individuals
So could the starfish that appear to be whipping off their own arms actually be creating new life
Unfortunately not
Thousands of sea stars are disintegrating and dying littering the seabed along the whole Pacific coast in
November 2014
Biologists announced that they found the culprit causing all of this devastation
It was a newly discovered virus sea star
Associated denser virus I say it's a newly discovered virus
But in fact subsequent investigation of museum specimens show that it's been knocking around since the 1940s
The trouble is no one knows why it's causing this horrendous outbreak right now
Although the disease is killing off many sea stars it may not be a total disaster
We do have a little glimmer of hope which is that this past spring and summer we have seen a big influx of
Juveniles is likely because when many animals are stressed as a sort of last-ditch efforts to keep the population going they'll reproduce
We won't know the final impact of this virus for some time, but we can only hope that nature's resilience
overcomes this disease