Meet the Biological Black Swan that's threatening Global Ruin and Never Considered by Nassim Taleb

In some places, black swans are numerous...

If you read between the lines of the eminent Nassim Taleb's latest musings, Biological Black Swan's don't exist. But they do. The Pundit thinks about them all the time. Surprising that -- The Master of the Black Swan thinking they are solely a metaphor. A blind spot so as to speak.

Meet the Tiny Killer Causing Millions of Sea Stars to Waste Away

The deadly sea star wasting disease, which turns live animals into slimy goop, is caused by a previously unknown virus. By Rachel Nuwer smithsonian.com

At the Smithsonian:
Last year, a plague broke out in the Pacific. From Alaska to Mexico, millions of sea stars from 20 different species contracted a mysterious disease that condemns nearly 100 percent of its victims to a horrific death. First the sea stars become lethargic. Then their limbs start curling in on themselves. Lesions appear, some of the sea stars' arms might fall off and the animals go limp. Finally, like something straight from the set of a horror movie, an infected sea star undergoes “rapid degradation”—the scientific term for melting. All that is left is a pile of slime and a few pieces of invertebrate skeleton.
RELATED CONTENT
What’s Killing the Sea Stars?
Despite the magnitude of the loss, no one knew what was behind the condition, known as sea-star wasting disease. Now a culprit has finally been identified: a virus that has been targeting marine animals for at least 72 years. A large team of American and Canadian researchers revealed the killer today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences...

More @ Meet the Tiny Killer Causing Millions of Sea Stars to Waste Away | Science | Smithsonian:

Significance
Sea stars inhabiting the Northeast Pacific Coast have recently experienced an extensive outbreak of wasting disease, leading to their degradation and disappearance from many coastal areas. In this paper, we present evidence that the cause of the disease is transmissible from disease-affected animals to apparently healthy individuals, that the disease-causing agent is a virus-sized microorganism, and that the best candidate viral taxon, the sea star-associated densovirus (SSaDV), is in greater abundance in diseased than in healthy sea stars.

PNAS USA Original paper: Biological Sciences - Microbiology

Ian Hewson, Jason B. Button, Brent M. Gudenkauf, Benjamin Miner, Alisa L. Newton, Joseph K. Gaydos, Janna Wynne, Cathy L. Groves, Gordon Hendler, Michael Murray, Steven Fradkin, Mya Breitbart, Elizabeth Fahsbender, Kevin D. Lafferty, A. Marm Kilpatrick, C. Melissa Miner, Peter Raimondi, Lesanna Lahner, Carolyn S. Friedman, Stephen Daniels, Martin Haulena, Jeffrey Marliave, Colleen A. Burge, Morgan E. Eisenlord, and C. Drew Harvell

Densovirus associated with sea-star wasting disease and mass mortality

PNAS 2014 ; published ahead of print November 17, 2014, doi:10.1073/pnas.1416625111