"SITKA, AK — It’s early morning in southeast Alaska. Stars have yet to fade from the night sky. A group of scientists sets out in search of a different kind of star. Sea stars, commonly known as starfish, have been vanishing from North America’s Pacific shoreline.

'Almost everywhere we’ve looked in the last year, we’ve seen catastrophic losses of sea stars,' says Pete Raimondi, a biology professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who has been studying an alarming epidemic that’s been killing starfish by the millions."

Kate Campbell reports for Oregon Public Broadcasting/EarthFix October 8, 2014. [2]