Sunflower starfish can be fixed near the California coast to restore the key to kelp forest

Ashley Kidd, who was a few minutes late and logged into the Zoom call, said that 12 minutes ago, an unexpected development was created by a planned endangered starfish.

Kidd, the conservation program manager at the Monterey Bay Area Sunflower Star Laboratory, is part of a race squad designed to travel to an aquarium in Alaska, which is designed to inject sunflower-seeded starfish from the facility with egg-induced hormones. They will then freeze some male sperm out there and bring it back to 10 scenes, adult starfish and larvae – with them back to the next 48 years old.

But some giant, velvety echinoderm spontaneously begin the egg-laying process-the group arrives three days before the group arrives.

“The good thing is that they have six men disappearing, so [with] All of these sperm, because we will be there on Monday, we can run. ” Kidd said.

The mission marks another step in an effort to restore species that scientists do not realize, which is key to maintaining healthy kelp forests until they basically disappear overnight.

Sunflower Starfish – a vivid colored creature with up to 24 arms and can be a major puppy – once flourished along the Pacific coast of Alaska and Baja, California. Then, in 2013, a mysterious disease associated with ocean heat waves began to destroy the population. An estimated 5.75 billion sunflower seeds starfish are killed, accounting for 94% of the global population. California lost about 99% pycnopodia helianthoides Waste of disease. Sunflower Seeds stars landed in the international alliance on the 2020 International Nature Conservation Hazards List.

As ecological dominoes begin to decline, destructiveness has caused damage.

Carnivorous starfish chew on purple urchins, and may even stop them by using chemical cues to scare them. Urchins swallowed Kelp, which isolated carbon and provided shelter and food for numerous marine life. Without starfish to balance the food web, the number of urchins explodes. On the North Coast of California, other urchins (such as otters, thorn lobsters and sheep heads) are lacking, lacking 96% of the kelp forests in the area disappeared In the decade after the starfish collapse.

“It’s kind of like…’ You don’t know what you have,” said Norah Eddy, deputy director of the California Conservancy’s Marine Program.

Baby sunflower starfish from the Pacific aquarium in Long Beach.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

But, she added, if the population of starfish can be restored, it can be “turned around” in the resuscitation of kelp forests. Some aspects of biological biology make it a good candidate for such comeback. A single breeding against sunflower stars may produce thousands of offspring—many mouths can be poured onto sea urchins. By contrast, bringing an otter back to the ecosystem can take a lot of time and investment.

Since its collapse, California’s sunflower seed starfish population has not bounced on its own. But in recent years, great progress has been made in breeding of imprisoned animals with the goal of ultimately releasing them in the wild.

The spawning of starfish marks an important milestone at the birch aquarium at the Scripps Oceanography Institute on Valentine’s Day last year. This is the first successful egg spawn in California animals.

This shows that researchers can promote reproductive levels to support reintroduction, said Kylie Lev, curator of the Steinhart Aquarium of the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. She said a large number of animals are needed because not everyone will do it in the wild.

“We are all very happy, very surprised and shocked because the gates can produce so many animals,” she said. Institutions up and down the state – including the Academy, Cal Poly Humboldt, Long Beach and the Aquarium of Pacific and Aquariums at Monterey Bay Aquarium occupy the fertilized embryos and are able to lift them into healthy stars that are still strong.

She added: “This changes the point around whether it can be done: it can be done, let’s make sure it does think.”

Andrew Kim, a lab manager at Sunflower Star Lab, a nonprofit organization, led research and conservation to restore the species, tilted his computer screen in a Zoom call to show dozens of young stars alone, thanks to rampant cannibals-looking like plastic images.

“They are all brothers and sisters,” he said.

In fact, according to King, all the teenagers in the state are. That's because last year, only one male and one female breed in the birch aquarium.

This makes them not ideal for releasing large batches of releases. Lev said the creatures would not migrate, so if they were thrown into the tidal pool, they might only mate with each other. In many species, inbreeding can reduce health and fitness.

Indeed, one of the main challenges scientists face is the reintroduction of sunflower-seeded starfish into the California coast is the lack of genetic diversity.

Enter the center of Alaska Seal Island, an aquarium with 40 sunflower starfishes, the largest animal collection in the world. The researchers will bring 10 of them back to the continuation of the United States, with five of them going to Golden State. This will roughly double the six of human care currently in California.

According to relevant personnel, this is a big deal. Many regulatory barriers must be cleared, involving cooperation with officials in Alaska and California. The transfer of animals from Alaska to California should be more fluidly transported to California from places like Washington and Oregon, which helps further diversify the population there.

Researchers were galvanized with high bets. If the Keystone species examined sea urchins that could heal kelp forests, we could restore economic drivers and a powerful tool to fight climate change. Kelp captures 20 times more carbon than land forests. This is also the home of marine animals. Without kelp, many people disappeared – some supporting fisheries.

Release laboratory-raised stars into the ocean for at least a few years. Infrastructure and expertise in feeding organisms are needed. Major research and logistical questions need to be answered. One big thing is to learn more about the nature of starfish waste disease and how to build resilience in starfish. Based on how everything shakes, Eddie speculates that stars can reintroduce the Pacific in three to five years.