Starfish in the Pacific have been dying of a strange illness that causes their arms to crawl away in opposite directions until they rip off, killing the animal within a day.

Perishing by the tens of thousands, the starfish are affected by a disease called "sea star wasting syndrome," Gawker reported via EarthFix.

The ill starfish, which have been found on both the east and west coasts, could be part of a larger problem.

"It certainly suggests that those ecosystems are not healthy," said Ben Miner, a biology professor at Western Washington University who studies marine life. "To have diseases that can affect that many species, that widespread is, I think is just scary."

The sea stars affected with the illness develop lesions on their bodies, according to Gawker. Their arms twist into knots and then walk away from the starfish until the limbs rip off. The starfish die within 24 hours after they can't regenerate new arms.

Laura James, a West Seattle scuba diver familiar with Puget Sound, noticed the starfish fragments washing up on shore.

"There were just bodies everywhere," James told EarthFix. "There were just splats. It looked like somebody had taken a laser gun and just zapped them and they just vaporized."

James, who has been diving in Puget Sound for more than 20 years, is trying to track the starfish through social media with the hashtag #sickstarfish.

Some theorize that the disease comes from a foreign pathogen imported on shipping routes, which would fit with some of the locations.

Starfish are animals especially vital to  the marine ecosystem and are known as a "keystone species" since they are predators similar to the lion in Africa.

"These are ecologically important species," said Drew Harvell, a marine epidemiologist from Cornell University Harvell, as quoted by NPR. "To remove them changes the entire dynamics of the marine ecosystem. When you lose this many sea stars it will certainly change the seascape underneath our waters."

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