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Sea star wasting disease pathology

Metadata Updated: July 6, 2024

Sea star wasting disease (SSWD) is a suite of poorly described non-specific clinical signs including abnormal posture, epidermal ulceration, and limb autotomy (sloughing) causing mortalities of over 20 species of sea stars and subsequent ecological shifts throughout the northeastern Pacific. While SSWD is widely assumed to be infectious with environmental conditions facilitating disease progression, little data exist on cellular changes associated with disease that could inform mechanisms of disease pathogenesis and host susceptibility. Here, we replicated SSWD by exposing captive Pisaster ochraceus to a suite of non-infectious organic substances and show that development of gross lesions is a basal to surface process involving inflammation (e.g. infiltration of coelomocytes) of ossicles and mutable collagenous tissues leading to epidermal ulceration. Affected sea stars also manifest increases in a heretofore undocumented coelomocyte type, spindle cells, that might be a useful marker of inflammation in this species. Finally, compared to purple morphs, orange P. ochraceus developed more severe lesions and survived longer. Longer lived, and presumably more visible severely lesioned orange sea stars, could have important demographic implications in terms of detectability of lesioned animals in the wild and measures of apparent prevalence of disease.

Access & Use Information

Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: No license information was provided. If this work was prepared by an officer or employee of the United States government as part of that person's official duties it is considered a U.S. Government Work.

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Dates

Metadata Created Date June 1, 2023
Metadata Updated Date July 6, 2024

Metadata Source

Harvested from DOI EDI

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date June 1, 2023
Metadata Updated Date July 6, 2024
Publisher U.S. Geological Survey
Maintainer
@Id http://datainventory.doi.gov/id/dataset/033eafa0e13ab05ff318cfe23a5e334d
Identifier USGS:601066c5d34e162231fed0e0
Data Last Modified 20210319
Category geospatial
Public Access Level public
Bureau Code 010:12
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
Metadata Catalog ID https://datainventory.doi.gov/data.json
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Harvest Object Id 1c0fc196-9bca-49e7-9876-7c9ed049c179
Harvest Source Id 52bfcc16-6e15-478f-809a-b1bc76f1aeda
Harvest Source Title DOI EDI
Metadata Type geospatial
Old Spatial -123.0481,38.3332
Publisher Hierarchy White House > U.S. Department of the Interior > U.S. Geological Survey
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash 7a4099659a71159a8a64580df3ade85057b0598c6105ee50e375c0dc241e49f1
Source Schema Version 1.1
Spatial

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