Starfish — or sea stars — have been on earth far longer than humans; 474 million years longer, to be exact.
But even though the earliest traces of starfish stretch all the way back to the Paleozoic era, they’re not a sea creature that we should take for granted.
Due to sea star wasting disease, lower oxygen levels in seawater, and rising temperatures, starfish populations are at risk around the globe.
One species in particular — the sunflower star — was nearly wiped out completely. Across the last decade, the sunflower star population plummeted by over 90%.
Fortunately, in 2019, marine biologist Jason Hodin stepped up to save the sea stars from extinction.
At the University of Washington’s Friday Harbor Labs, Hodin has carefully grown and raised several generations of sunflower starfish in a controlled environment, breeding them from a select sample of starfish he rescued from the harbor five years prior.
And on August 10, Hodin led his research team in a historic release at Friday Harbor.
“We’ve been talking about this for five years now, it’s pretty exciting,” Hodin told KING 5 news network on the day of the release.
This was the first time ever that sea stars grown in a lab were put back into the wild.
“No one’s ever done this before with this age of star or with any captive-bred star before, so we have no idea what to expect,” said Hodin.
In scuba gear, researchers swam down to the ocean floor and deposited a box of ten baby starfish at a marked location. They plan to monitor them as the creatures explore the same harbor where their ancestors were plucked in 2019.
“We’re not going to repopulate the entire ocean with these ten sea stars or even with the hundreds that we have in the lab, but we can show how it’s done,” Hodin explained.
Thanks to Hodin’s breakthroughs in the lab, The Henry Doorly Zoo and Aquarium in Omaha has also started raising starfish in captivity.
“Jason’s success with the captive breeding of the Pycnos really provided the fire that lit the whole Pycnopodia recovery program, because it showed a positive way forward and a real opportunity,” Drew Harvell, a marine ecologist at Cornell University and Friday Harbor Labs, told Vox.
Another key factor in saving the sunflower starfish has been raising awareness of their decline. Thanks to efforts led by ecologist Sarah Gravem, the sunflower starfish became the first-ever marine invertebrate listed as a critically endangered species on the IUCN Red List, back in 2020.
From coral reefs to tidal pools, and seagrass meadows to kelp forests, starfish have proven to be a keystone species in freshwater habitats around the globe.
In fact, the phrase “keystone species” was first coined in relation to starfish when Robert Paine studied them in Washington in 1966.
By munching on sea urchins and mussels, starfish keep overpopulation of both at bay — increasing biodiversity and providing balanced access to resources for all kinds of organisms.
But for right now, Hodin is simply excited for what he and his team will discover from monitoring the starfish babies they just released.
“It’s a million questions that we’ve had about what these stars will do that we’ve been thinking about for years,” Hodin told KING 5. “And [we] will finally get some answers.”
Watch the video below to see how Hodin grew these starfish in the lab:
Header image via Ed Bierman (CC BY 2.0)
