![]() ![]() "I didn't really anticipate how exuberant their behaviors are," Hodin says. About 30 of these giants now live outside the lab in large, burbling tanks. His team started by taking some sunflower sea stars from the wild. "Nobody knows how to age a sea star, so you see something in the wild and you have no idea how old it is," Hodin says. He didn't know the answer to some of the most basic questions, such as what did this species eat early on? And how fast could it grow? "For this species in particular, there were very few published efforts to raise them at all, even through embryo or larval stages," Hodin says. The sea star on the bottom, called Charlotte, is the mother of the lab's 1-year-old juvenile stars. Shells from earlier meals collect at the bottom of the tank. "They really do kind of like dissolve into a pile of goo."Īdult sunflower sea stars feed on mussels at the Friday Harbor Laboratories. "I witnessed it, and it's not pretty," he says. Hodin says the sick sea stars are horrible to behold. This species seems particularly susceptible to a wasting disease that's hit more than 20 sea star species since 2013. I've heard scattered reports of people maybe seeing a few." "Some people think that they are entirely extinct in the wild down there. In California, "sunflower sea stars are more than 95% gone," Hodin says. In recent years, however, populations of the sunflower sea star have declined by 80% to 100%. Their consumption of sea urchins, in particular, helped to protect vital forests of kelp, which are home to numerous marine species. Their brightly colored bodies - which come in vivid shades of orange, pink, blue and green - would move along the seafloor on as many as 24 arms, gobbling up mussels and scallops and sea urchins. This voracious predator used to prowl the waters across a nearly 2,000-mile range, from Alaska to Baja California. The sunflower sea star breeding program is a partnership between the university and the Nature Conservancy. Jason Hodin, research scientist at the University of Washington's Friday Harbor Laboratories, works in the sea star captive rearing lab. Now, though, it's critically endangered and is being driven toward extinction by a mysterious, devastating disease. It's one of the biggest sea stars in the world, with an arm span that can be more than 3 feet across, and it used to be a common sight in the waters off the West Coast. That's because this is Pycnopodia helianthoides, aka the sunflower sea star. But when this baby is all grown up, it could be as big as a manhole cover. "That's a juvenile sea star that's about a month old." "See that? That little dot right there in front of my finger?" Hodin says. Hodin pulls off the lid and peers inside at some crushed bits of shell. ![]() At the end is a square, sandwich-size Tupperware container, with mesh-covered holes in the sides to let water flow through. Jason Hodin hauls up a rope that's hanging from a dock in the waters off San Juan Island in the Pacific Northwest. It's a desperate attempt to save the endangered animals from disappearing completely. ![]() This can cause other marine species that wouldn't typically have any bioluminescence to glow at night, which means visitors could find glowing fish swimming around if they look hard enough.On an island off the coast of Washington state, scientists have resorted to breeding sunflower sea stars in a lab.
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