Washington scientist brings new hope to dying coastal sea star

The once thriving sunflower sea star has all but disappeared along the West Coast, but a San Juan Island lab is cultivating a new generation

Jason Hodin buried his face in a microscope. Like many biologists, he spends much of his time viewing life at the micro level. Using a pipette — a tool that transfers precise amounts of liquid — he methodically sifted through a small bowl of water containing thousands of amoeba-shaped sea star larvae in his lab on Washington’s San Juan Island. Over time, tiny dust particles and debris fall into the bowl, putting the larvae in danger of contamination.

“We spend a fair amount of time every four days looking at a whole bunch of larvae in the microscope and pulling out what we call, in technical terms, the crud,” he said. “Sometimes I also refer to it as schmutz.”

Hodin runs the world’s first captive breeding program for Pycnopodia helianthoides, commonly known as the sunflower sea star.

The small University of Washington laboratory in Friday Harbor, Washington, may seem unremarkable to the casual observer, but in February when Hodin looked at the tanks teeming with juvenile pycnos, as he calls them for short, he was reminded of the groundbreaking research he and his team are engaging in.

“It’s like the most enjoyable thing that I could possibly imagine,” Hodin said. “Being able to see these stars grow from embryos to these incredible larval stages that undergo this incredible metamorphosis. I mean, this is an amazing thing to be able to witness.”