Frozen sperm could help bring these giant sea stars back from the brink of extinction
CBC
Melissa Torres spent her Valentine's Day helping to usher new life into the world — in the form of millions of fertilized sea star eggs.
Torres is part of a team that, on Feb. 14, successfully spawned and cross-fertilized sperm and eggs from male and female sunflower sea stars at the Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California.
It's a major step in a massive effort by scientists, governments and conservationists to save an important marine species that has been nearly annihilated by a mysterious wasting disease.
"It was, I will not lie, a lot of jumping and hugging and hooraying and screaming," Torres, an aquarist at Birch, told As It Happens host Nil Köksal.
"Now we're all trying to raise these babies so that we have some more animals to put back in the wild someday."
Sunflower sea stars are the biggest of the sea stars, growing up a metre in diametre — or, as Torres says, "as large as an extra large pizza."
They come in a variety of bright colours, and can grow as many as 24 arms, each covered with tiny tube feet they use to scamper across the ocean floor.
"They're so beautiful," Torrest said. "They do look exactly like you'd imagine a sunflower or sun that just has all these beautiful rays coming off of a central disk."
Once abundant in the Pacific Ocean, they have been all but wiped out in the wild over the last decade by a mysterious wasting disease linked to warming ocean temperatures.
The grisly disease causes sea stars' limbs to fall off and their bodies to disintegrate. First reported in 2013, it has since killed more than 5.7 billion sunflower sea stars — more than 90 per cent of their population.
In southern California, 99 per cent have died, making them functionally extinct.
This has had devastating effects on the ecosystem, which relies on the stars to eat sea urchins, which, in turn, feast on kelp.
"Without these sea stars to forage on the sea urchins, we have actually lost a majority of our kelp forests along the Pacific Northwest coast," Torres said.
"And these kelp forests provide not only homes, but food, for animals, as well as carbon sequestration."