California Academy of Sciences secures grant to help endangered sea stars

(report from San Francisco television station, ABC O&O)

Here's an update on a Bay Area project to help bring a struggling species back from the brink of extinction, which would help put our coastal ecosystem back in balance.

Last time we visited the sea star lab at the California Academy of Sciences, it had the vibe of a busy maternity ward. The new arrivals were tiny Sunflower sea stars, known as gametes, about to be raised in nurturing tanks with swirling spatulas, before taking a temporary leap into the real world.

"So, these are all animals raised in captivity," said Marine Researcher Riah Evin, who added that a number of them recently took a leap into the real world.

In a unique experiment, beginning several months ago, the lab-grown stars were placed in cages in Monterey Bay for a full-on soak test, to see if they could survive in the open ocean before being retrieved.

"So it was a test to see animals that had never touched the ocean before, how they would do and release them. And everybody got through it fine," she said.

And that success is especially critical now, because the species has nearly disappeared from their normal coastal environment, victims of a sea star wasting disease. Their absence triggered a chain reaction, allowing sea urchins they typically feed on to explode in numbers and begin gobbling up underwater kelp forests. But, in a major breakthrough, scientists recently identified the pathogen that causes the disease.

"So now that our colleagues have identified this bacterium that is causing sea star wasting disease, it really opens up this huge new set of research questions that we can start to address," said Evolutionary Biologist Elora Lopez-Nadam, Ph.D.

Ultimately, could scientists identify and raise healthy stars and reintroduce them into the ocean? Lopez-Nandam says a new project now underway could help answer those questions, thanks in part to a major grant from the California Ocean Protection Council. Her team will be using a technique called environmental DNA, or eDNA, to monitor ocean water for traces of healthy Sunflower stars who may have survived the initial die-off.

"So we can use environmental DNA, which is basically DNA that animals shed out into the water. And so, if you take a water sample and filter that water until you just collect the DNA that's in the water, you can then sequence it. And we in particular are going to be interested in looking for do we get a hit for sunflowers," said Lopez-Nandam.

She says it's a chance to learn if certain genetic traits can protect the Sunflower sea stars. And while divers will be working in deeper water, another Academy Researcher Rebecca Johnson, Ph.D., will be launching an army of shoreline surveyors, including volunteers.

"To get them to go help us look for these stars that are really, really rare. We've had great success with getting people more people out to the beach looking," Johnson said.

And while reintroducing healthy lab grown sea stars back into the ocean would likely be many years off, the Academy team and their collaborators are already building the scientific know-how and developing the techniques that could someday help restore a struggling species. In addition to training volunteers to look for sea stars, the Academy is also hoping to create water sampling kits so they can help with the marine-DNA program as well.