Scientists Raise Endangered ‘Sea Stars’ in Lab — Then They Released Them Into the Wild for First Time

“This is male! This one is female,” a scientist from the University of Washington yelled while scribbling details in a matrix drawn out on a whiteboard in their Friday Harbor laboratory, led by biologist Jason Hodin. They had recently combed some gorgeous “sea stars” from the oceans, hauled them in buckets, and brought them to the lab to help them reproduce. They injected the creatures with a hormone that would enable reproduction. Hailed as one of the most terrifying predators of the sea, “Sunflower sea stars,” a.k.a. starfish, had been showing the signs of extinction ever since a pathogen dwindled their population, as per KING5.

This experiment, the university says in a video, is “something that has never been done before.” Across the last decade, the population of these sunflower sea stars had plummeted by over 90%, per NOAA Fisheries, and being a marine biologist, Hodin had to do something to restore it. Together with his team at the university laboratory, he carefully brought the sea stars, helping them reproduce in a controlled environment.

Sea stars, as their name suggests, are star-shaped predators that patrol the reef-laden floors of the sea, explains National Geographic. Despite being bloodless and just the seawater bubbling in their veins, these creatures can gobble up everything from corals, sponges, oysters, and even their distant relatives like sea urchins, sand dollars, and sea cucumbers. In ancient times, some frustrated fishermen cut up starfish and dumped them into the ocean, only to be met with a savage betrayal. Possessing an almost treacherous power, the starfish can regenerate a whole new body with just one of its limbs.

A diver entering the ocean might feel the eerie gaze of their eyes that sit on the tips of their arms. If a prey dares to go too close, the starfish will pop out their stomachs, spilling acids directly upon them and chewing them down right away. The 500-million-year-old species, however, had almost came closer extinction, where their population wasn’t rising anymore on the breeding scale. “We’ve been talking about this for five years now, it’s pretty exciting,” Hodin told KING 5 news network, “It’s a million questions that we’ve had about what these stars will do that we’ve been thinking about for years. And [we] will finally get some answers.”

Thanks to Hodin’s efforts, other marine organizations in the region have also initiated conservation projects to revive the dying sea star family. “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. Eventually, all these sea stars will be released from the glass tanks into the wild, and there, they will be untamed, unstoppable, and indestructible once more.