A laboratory dedicated to restoring Sunflower Stars (pycnopodia helianthoides) to California coastal waters. Located in Monterey Bay, California. In 2013 sea star wasting syndrome destroyed Sunflower ...

Sunflower sea stars are critically endangered in the Pacific Ocean. University of Washington researchers are working with the Samish Indian Nation to bring this 24-armed creature back from the brink o...

Sunflower Sea Star from University Rd, Friday Harbor, WA, US on March 18, 2024 at 01:52 PM by John Dorrian

The Center for Biological Diversity has filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, pushing to finalize long‑delayed protections for the imperiled sunflower sea star. Sunflower sea stars (Pycnopodia helianthoides) are enormous compared to their counterparts, about 3 feet wide with up to 24 arms. They display a wide range of colors, often in combinations including bright orange, yellow-red, brown, purple, pink and occasionally blue. They occur throughout intertidal and subtidal coastal waters of the Northeast Pacific Ocean from the Aleutian Islands, Alaska, to at least northern Baja California, Mexico. The animals used to be abundant along Oregon's coast -- but nearly 90% of the entire population has been lost due to a gruesome disease known as Sea Star Wasting Syndrome. It causes their arms to twist, melt away and fall off, ultimately resulting in death. The Center for Biological Diversity’s Oceans Program Director Miyoko Sakashita is one of the attorneys who filed the lawsuit on June 22. Sakashita said she sued because the National Marine Fisheries Service has yet to list the giant sea star as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. She explained that while still under the Biden administration in 2023, the federal government acknowledged the urgency and...

When over 99 percent of California’s sunflower sea stars mysteriously wasted away 10 years ago, an already stressed ecosystem unraveled. Sunflower sea stars—Pycnopodia helianthoides—may look like a purely decorative feature of the ocean floor, but they’re voracious predators. As adults, they can grow up to 24 arms, span three feet wide, and move three feet per minute. They are superlative, and alien—one of the largest and arguably most ravenous sea stars in the world. But at the end of 2013, a colossal marine heatwave swept over the north east Pacific just as a mysterious underwater epidemic began causing sea stars to die off en masse. Without a primary predator, an excess of purple sea urchins insatiably consumed their surrounding kelp forests. Over the past 100 years, these large ribbons of golden-brown seaweed had already dwindled in some stretches of the coast, due in large part to warming ocean conditions. By 2017, this sudden explosion of hungry sea urchins and an ongoing marine heat wave, strengthened by an El Niño weather pattern, wiped out more than 90 percent of kelp forests in some West Coast regions. Kelp forests on the West Coast are critical habitats that support dozens of species, from...

Sunflower Sea Star from Piper Point, Sechelt Inlet, BC, Canada on November 8, 2007 at 01:51 PM by Neil McDaniel. This Pycnopodia attacked an Apostichopus californicus. The cucumber escaped easily usi...