An award-winning photographer has captured the somber moment when dozens of colorful starfish set about decimating a dead sea lion.
The photo was taken in the shallow water of Monterey Bay. The sea lions in the background are most likely California sea lions, but they could also be Steller sea lions.
There are bat stars and starfish in the sea stars. The bat stars help recycle the sea lion into energy and nutrition.
The picture won first place in the "Aquatic Life" category at the California Academy of Science's big picture competition.
A photograph won an award. There is a person named David Slater.
"I knew this image was special when I first published it, but words can't describe how I feel taking first place in such a prestigious contest," he wrote on the social media site. He said that the image shows that beauty and adventure can be found outside.
No one knows why decapitated sea lions turn up on the island.
The sea lion in the picture was dead. It could have died from natural causes, such as a vessel strike, or it could have been killed by an accident.
California sea lion populations are increasing in size and are listed as "least concern" on the International Union for Conservation Nature's red list of threatened species.
The webbing between their arms looks like a bat's wings. The Monterey Bay Aquarium says that the starfish can have as many as nine arms and can be up to 20 centimeters across.
They are most often red, orange, yellow, brown, green, or purple.
Bat stars have light-sensitive "eye-spots" at the end of their arms, and olfactory cells on the bottom of their arms, which allow them to "taste" chemicals left in the water.
According to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, when bat stars find food, they excrete one of their two stomachs through their mouths to break it down before they eat it.
The starfish have worms that live in the grooves on the underside of the stars' bodies and feed on scraps left by their hosts. There may be more than 100 worms in the new image because a single bat star can support up to 20 of them.
The bat stars and their hitchhiking worms are scavengers and play an important role in the ocean's ecology.
The organizers of the Big Picture competition said that the sea lion is giving back to the community that it once swam in.
When the bat stars have had enough, any number of creatures big and small will be able to derive energy and shelter from what's left behind for years to come.
Bat stars might be under threat due to climate change. The sea star wasting syndrome was first seen in Alaska in 2013).
According to the National Park Service, the disease is caused by a bacterium and can lead to arm loss and even death.
The Monterey Bay Aquarium says that bat stars are at risk from this disease.
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The original article was published by Live Science. The original article can be found here.
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