Billions of sea stars have died. A Northwest tribe is trying to save the species
Three-year-old sunflower stars explore the kelp forest for the first time. They come in a rainbow of colors but are all the same species. The stars in this cohort are called the “snack pack,” so they all have snack names, from Cheeto and Noodles to Sweet Potato.
Jennifer Adler
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Jennifer Adler
On a spring morning so blustery that the National Weather Service issued a small craft advisory, a Samish Indian Nation research boat, called the Chinook (Yómech), set out from Anacortes, Washington, just east of the San Juan Islands.
A team of divers crammed into the cabin as the small craft bounced and slammed across Rosario Strait. They were on their way to pick up precious cargo: 20 endangered sunflower stars, raised by hand in a lab at Friday Harbor on San Juan Island.
Sunflower stars are one of the Pacific Ocean’s most endangered sea creatures. For the past year, University of Washington researchers have worked closely with the Samish Indian Nation to bring this 24-armed creature back from the brink of extinction after a vast underwater pandemic nearly wiped it out.
The choppy waters of Rosario Strait were only the latest obstacle in the tribe’s effort to bring sunflower stars back to traditional Samish territory.
“I’ve had dreams about this day. I’ve had nightmares about this day,” said Samish Nation biologist Sam Strauss. “Many things have already gone wrong that I didn’t anticipate, and I’m sure there will be a couple more.”
The stars were supposed to be turned loose last October. Then divers found the deadly sea-star wasting disease — the cause of the species’ near-annihilation — surging throughout the San Juans. They called off the release. Six months later, it was back on.
A deadly outbreak
Sunflower stars can grow more than 3 feet wide and are the fastest of all sea stars. They cruise the seabed at up to 5 feet per minute in search of sea urchins or sea cucumbers to grab for a meal.
They’re considered a keystone species, whose presence or absence can reshape a whole ecosystem.
But the speedy predators have been unable to outrun a wasting disease that’s killed billions of sea stars. It took researchers a decade to pinpoint the Vibrio bacteria behind the disease that dissolved sea stars into goo.
Researchers say ocean heat waves, amplified by climate change, helped the bacteria grow.
“We definitely have lost a lot of sea stars,” University of Washington research scientist Jason Hodin said. “We’ve lost 90% of our sunflower stars, we think.”
Hodin runs the sea star lab at the university’s Friday Harbor Laboratories.
“This was a really, really big outbreak,” Hodin. “It spread from northern Mexico all the way to Alaska, affecting dozens and dozens of sea star species.”
Jason Hodin, a research scientist at the University of Washington and Scott McIntosh lower a box of 3-year-old lab-reared sunflower sea stars into the sea at Decatur Island in the San Juans, Wash.
Jennifer Adler
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Jennifer Adler
No species was harder hit than the sunflower star.
International scientists declared the once-common species critically endangered, and Canada declared it endangered.
The Biden administration proposed protecting sunflower stars under the Endangered Species Act, but the Trump administration has not taken action on that proposal. A spokesperson with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, which is responsible for protecting ocean species, said the agency was prioritizing other “mission critical” work.
In June, the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity sued to protect the sunflower star.
Underwater charisma
Inside the sea star lab, tanks of filtered seawater harbor hundreds of sunflower stars, from microscopic larvae up to adults as big as stop signs.
The researchers have figured out by trial and error how to breed these little-studied animals. They’ve also cured some of them when wasting disease got into the lab.
“It’s not a pretty death,” explained research assistant Chloe Schwab, “and it’s really sad to see.”
It was an emotional day for the researchers as they prepared to send some of the lab’s three-year-olds — each a bit larger than a human adult’s outstretched hand — off into the world.
They loaded four sloshing tubs of stars onto the Samish boat.
Scott McIntosh and Willem Weertman carry a box of 3-year-old lab-reared sunflower sea stars down to the dock at Friday Harbor Labs to be released at a nearby island. McIntosh works for the Samish Nation and Weertman is a PhD candidate in Jason Hodin’s lab at University of Washington studying sunflower stars.
Jennifer Adler
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Jennifer Adler
“I really am close to them,” said research assistant Julia Knopf.
She and others in the lab have given each sunflower star a name. Nacho, Baby Carrot, and Pluot were inside the tubs, among other stars named after snack foods.
“I do feel like a parent,” Knopf said. “You raise them, you take care of them, you want the best for them, but then you know the best for them is letting them go out in the wild, just like letting your kid go out into the world.”
These invertebrates have no faces, blood, or brains, yet they have personalities, according to their caretakers.
“They’re very charismatic,” said research assistant Tess Chapman. “They have little eyespots at the end of their arms. They’re always looking at you.”
The stars usually cuddle up with their tank neighbors. Some are feisty. Some are docile.
“They don’t have a centralized brain,” Knopf said, who calls the animals “amazing.”
“They’re also so beautiful that it’s hard not to love them,” she said.
Protecting a kelp goddess
Sunflower stars were never a big part of Samish culture, unlike salmon.
”We’re the salmon people, for sure,” said Samish tribal chair Tom Wooten.
But the stars have played a supporting role in Samish culture by protecting kelp. Many kelp forests on the West Coast have been stripped bare by sea urchins. Sunflower stars prey on urchins, which protects kelp.
“That’s why those starfish are so important, because they munch those green urchins!” Wooten said. “ You need those predators.”
A 24-foot cedar pole looms above Wooten at Rosario Beach in Deception Pass State Park in traditional Samish territory. The carving depicts a female figure holding a salmon above her head: a Samish deity named Ko-Kwal-Alwoot.
Rosario Beach in Deception Pass State Park in traditional Samish territory.
VWPics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
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VWPics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
On one side she is human. On the other, she is a sea creature, her hair turned to long fronds of bull kelp.
In Samish legend, Ko-Kwal-Alwoot was a young woman from Rosario village who married the king of the sea and became immortal.
“If you look into the water, you’ll see the bull kelp swirling around in the tide. That’s her out there,” Wooten said. “That’s her hair, letting us know that she’s still there.”
“She’s the protector of our people,” Wooten said. “She ensures that waters are clean and the fish are there, and the clams are there, the crab, all the things that we rely on.”
The Samish belief mirrors biologists’ knowledge that kelp forests protect coastlines from erosion and nurture popular species like salmon and orcas.
“They harbor an incredible amount of biodiversity. They protect shorelines. They support local fisheries,” Hodin said. “It’s almost like, what do kelp forests not do?”
The Samish Indian Nation Department of Natural Resources closely monitors the health of local kelp forests and, in February, replanted a kelp bed, a first for the San Juan Islands.
Sunflower stars are such voracious consumers of sea urchins that the Friday Harbor sea star lab struggles to keep up with their appetites. Even tiny, young stars will eat up to 18 juvenile sea urchins each day.
”We’re urchin farmers,” Hodin said. “We’re farming them, constantly producing thousands and thousands and thousands of urchins in buckets to be able to feed these hundreds of sea stars.”
“It’s insane,” he said.
Making a tribal home
Protecting kelp beds is part of the Samish tribe’s efforts to make a home for itself.
The tribe never got a reservation.
”We were scattered to the winds, and we’re in an effort to bring people back home,” Wooten said.
The Samish also never got the valuable fishing rights that most tribes in Washington state have, due to a clerical error at the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
In 1969, a clerk left the Samish Nation off of a list of recognized tribes. Five years later, a U.S. district court judge ruled that tribes in the state were entitled to half the fish and shellfish in their traditional areas. But the Samish were “left on the beach,” Wooten explains, and even though the tribe regained its federal status as a recognized tribe in 1996, it still lacks fishing rights.
The few Samish tribal members who fish for a living do so in Alaska.
“For all of our ceremonies and gatherings, we purchase fish just like everybody else,” Wooten said.
The tribe has been buying land, developing low-income housing, and restoring habitats on land and at sea to build a home for the community.
“It’s really nature that we live in,” Wooten said. “We have to do what we can to preserve, protect, and restore that to have a place to come home to.”
To help fight the climate change that is making ocean life more susceptible to disease outbreaks, the Samish commissioned a zero-emission, electric research boat, with delivery expected in 2027.
Gliding to freedom
The Chinook (Yómech) research boat reached a sheltered cove off Decatur Island – the future home of the sunflower stars.
“Pool’s open!” boat captain Elena Fischer announced.
Divers jumped into the waters, carefully swimming the four plastic tubs to the sea floor, where they pulled the lids off and waited for the sunflower stars to glide to freedom.
Pesto the 3-year-old star emerges into the kelp forest for the first time.
Jennifer Adler
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Jennifer Adler
“They left their bins incredibly quickly and started exploring the environment and finding different rocks to hang out on and kelp fronds to hide under,” Strauss said.
For a while, he lay on the sea floor, just watching.
“Got to see a star fully exit one of the totes and touch actual, natural substrate for the first time,” Strauss said. “I was just so grateful to see these stars, healthy, happy in the water.”
What’s next
By May, the site off Decatur Island had been inundated with fresh kelp growth. Divers found 14 of the 20 lab-raised stars and no signs of disease. They consider that a success.
Researchers say the release will help them figure out what works before releasing sunflower stars on a larger scale.
In May, Hodin’s lab released thousands of poppy-seed-sized juvenile sunflower stars off San Juan Island to assess whether it might be more efficient than raising them to maturity in tanks. It’s hard to know how well those stars have fared. Hodin said they were too tiny to track.
A dozen labs up and down the West Coast are currently raising sunflower stars, with small releases planned later this year in California and Oregon.
It is unlikely biologists will ever raise anything close to the 5 billion sunflower stars lost to wasting disease.
But they hope to raise enough of them to point the species, and kelp forests, toward recovery.
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