WW: Ochre star

(Pisaster ochraceus.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Invasive snail

(Cornu aspersum, the brown garden snail. Originally imported to the North Coast from Europe to be eaten as escargot; now it's eating us.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Pacific sideband snail

(Monadenia fidelis.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Mummified crab

This hand-sized specimen of Puget Sound kelp crab (Pugettia producta) quite startled me on the high tide line, far from its habitat on the low tidelands, till I noticed that it was completely dead and dry. Probably thrown up there by the waves, then dried by the sun in this lifelike posture.

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Starfish Report 2023

Healthy adult P. ochreceus.

I conducted my informal annual survey of a local beach a few weeks ago and found the wasting-syndrome situation holding, relative to past years. The species recorded in the past are present in similar number, with a possible bump in the number of Pisaster ochraceus, the purple starfish. In that case I noted a heartening continued presence of adults with no noticeable infection or mutilation, supported by what I believe is a modest rise in the number of youngsters.

As this iconic North Coast star all but vanished at the height of the pandemic, I was touched to note this.

White E. troschelii.

With any good luck, this old friend is back to stay.

Evasterias troschelii, the mottled star, held the lead as the largest population on the tidelands since reclaiming first place from Dermasterias a few years back, though they still run small compared to pre-SSWS norms. Together with what may be signs of plague in two of the largest specimens, this may be a bit of a blue note. (See photographs; one individual appears unusually white about the disc, and a ray of another seems whiter and weaker than normal where it's been thrown over a cobble. Compare with the photos on this page. Again, I'm relying solely on 60 years of familiarity with the starfish of my homeland; this wasn't a scientific survey, and I may have misread the cues.)

So Evasterias may still be dying

Possible infected ray.

before it reaches full size. If so, the breeding population is keeping apace, so there are grounds to hope for an evolved solution.

For the rest, leather stars (Dermasterias imbricata) seem about as present as before, and sadly, Pycnopodia helianthoides, the sunflower star, and Pisaster brevispinus, the giant pink star, just as extinct. I wasn't able to observe the blood stars (Henricia leviuscula), which barely reach the intertidal zone, because the tide was a few feet higher than those I've caught in the past.

Final analysis: though the beach apparently still isn't clean, all in all, an encouraging show by the new normal.

Adolescent P. ochreceus.

WW: Sea anemone eating a crab

(The anenome [suspect Urticina columbiana] is about the size of a teacup; the crab is Hemigrapsus oregonensis, the green shore crab.

Beach crabs are seldom swallowed by anemones; on the contrary, when below the waterline, these crabs often rest in the middle of an open anemone's tentacles for long periods. I suspect this bravado is down to the fact that they're hard as porcelain and quite intractable when challenged, which is why they have very few predators. So I have no idea what the story is here. This one was still perfectly healthy despite being half-gobbed, yet not trying in the least to escape. Perhaps he burrowed into the cnidarian deliberately, though to what end I've no better idea.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Giant acorn barnacle

(Balanus nubilus. Found it on the tideline after a heavy storm. It was delicious.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Starfish Report 2022

Maimed P. ochraceus with a replacement ray coming.

So here we are again, back at the usual beach, counting starfish. (On a -5 tide! The Woodstock of marine biology nerds.)

News on the viral front remains guardedly optimistic. In a nutshell, several species present that are susceptible to starfish wasting disease continue to indicate resilience to one extent or another, though the depredation of the virus is still evident.

The bad news is that there is still no Pycnopodia and no Pisaster brevispinus. Researchers suggest the first may now be extinct here, though I hold out hope for deep-water populations of both that may eventually repopulate the shallows.

Meanwhile, that other Pisaster – the iconic North Pacific ochraceus – continues to display real backbone. In addition to a few full-grown specimens that are looking very intact if a bit pale, I also found some badly maimed ones that nevertheless showed no signs of current infection, and were even regrowing eaten limbs. This acquired immunity – if that's what I'm seeing – bodes well for a return to former numbers.

Evasterias troschelli also maintains a pronounced presence, which is more good news, given that this was another species

Young Evasterias troschelli.

virtually wiped out on North Coast beaches the instant the virus appeared. Many juveniles dot the beach now – more, I believe, than last year – though so far no fully grown ones. That last point remains a bit troubling; these animals may still be falling to infection before reaching adulthood. But a few mid-sized ones, scattered among the bright, colourful youngsters, give hope that this species too will eventually surmount the plague entirely.

In any case, there was little evidence of active infections anywhere on the beach, which all by itself is huge.

For the rest, leather stars (Dermasterias imbricata) still mostly own the low intertidal zone. Formerly sparse in southern Puget Sound owing to heavy predation by Pycnopodia, the disappearance of that rapacious marauder, combined with Dermasterias' near-immunity to the wasting disease, has handed it a golden ticket. (Bad news for the anemones though, since this star goes positively Pyncopodia on their figurative backsides.)

Also of note were the continued presence of a few neon Henricia leviuscula, another genus that's largely, though not entirely, impervious to the virus.

So there you go. No miracles, but a heartening show of evolutionary vigour from those species that survived the first wave.

Two juvenile Dermasterias.

WW: Six-rayed leather star

(Same beach, different starfish. Individual from another five-rayed species [Dermasterias imbricata], randomly turning up with six. That early-days DNA showing its evolutionary bent again.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Does A Starfish Have Buddha-Nature?

I had the good fortune to be raised on the coast, and have spent a good deal of my life beside, on, and in the sea. The incredible diversity of the marine environment has always fascinated me; I never tire of turning over stones and gazing into tide pools, every one full of intriguing new creatures.

But from toddlerhood, what has captivated me most are the lowest phyla. And of these, my decided favourite were the echinoderms. I loved sea cucumbers, sea urchins, and sand dollars, but most especially starfish, in all their myriad extraterrestrial forms.

At the risk of bathos, I believe they were my first Zen teachers.

Because starfish, like other faceless marine invertebrates, have no brain. Yet they get on just fine.

They move about, eat, reproduce, and apparently enjoy your typical animal lifestyle, all without hearing, seeing, or thinking.

Still, they have to experience their habitat on some level. They're highly active, constantly touching everything with thousands of tiny restless feet. They know light from dark, warm from cold, wet from dry. When I pried one from a piling and lifted it out of the water, it clearly knew something was up, demonstrating behaviours my species associates with animation and alarm.

But they were obviously incapable of grasping my nature. Those little translucent fingers must've telegraphed something on the subject, but the creature clearly had no idea what I looked like; the whole notion of visual appearance is foreign to organisms without sight. Or sound, so there goes that dimension, too.

Raised into the air and sun, every marine thing suddenly gone from tactile contact, it had to be completely bewildered; the simple displacement of a few feet having brought this limited being into a world so strange it literally had no idea how to proceed.

I used to think about this as a kid: that starfish, wholly competent and to all appearances supremely confident in their intended environment, were probably certain that everything in existence could be known by their tube feet and rudimentary photosensors. Growing older, meeting many more sea stars, it also occurred to me that "what can be known" to starfish must in places exceed "what can be known" by humans; their radically different neural network can't just fail to catalogue information that ours can; in some domains, it must also catalogue information ours can't.

Jump ahead several decades, and I've now tried and failed to read marine biology at university (chemistry proving one of the categories of information my neural net does not catalogue), to splash at length into the sea of Zen.

Where I'm reminded daily of starfish.

Because Zenners talk about perception a lot. And the lack of it. And the lack of perceiving our lack of perception. And the perception that we're perceiving perceptions that we can't perceive we can't perceive.

And then perceiving that.

Without perceiving it.

All of which I suspect starfish are too insightful to piddle with.

But my species is dead certain everything that can be perceived, we can perceive. With our so-so eyes, our so-so ears, and especially, our simply magnificent, climax-community brain.

It isn't belief. It's knowledge.

I run into it all the time. Near-death experience people. Atheists. Certainty addicts of one cant or the other. And those annoying "scientific mindset" people who can't even perceive science, let alone everything.

We are chronically, incurably ignorant of giant swathes of existence. Whole dimensions. Entire phenomena that we don't simply not see or feel, but indeed that our brains, constructed for seeing and feeling, can't even picture. The very existence of these characteristics of reality, we will never grasp.

Because we're starfish.

And I think if a human can grasp that, there's hope for that human.

Besides, now Pisaster ochraceus, the purple sea star of my own North Pacific, apparently hunts in packs.

You read that right. These echinoderms band together like wolves and pitch epic raids against terrified prey.

This fact was only recently discovered by the planet's most advanced species, by an amateur diver no less, who noticed something quizzical in footage he'd taken of a P. ochraceus colony off the coast of Oregon. Curious, he sped up the film, then watched in horror as a brainless swarm of purple and orange sci-fi monsters zoomed at great speed over the rocks and sand, implacably herding and finally engulfing their presumably screaming quarry under a heap of flailing rays and gnashing centre discs.

Starfish are not intellectually equipped to do that.

But these do.

WW: Orb-weaving spider

(Suspect Araneus sp.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Starfish Correction

Will the real Pisaster brevispinus please stand up?

Looking again at the photo I published at the top of last week's post, purporting to be of an adult giant pink starfish (Pisaster brevispinus), I've come to the conclusion that it's actually just an unusually large leather star (Dermasterias imbricata). Among other things, it doesn't seem to have any brevispini (short spines).

Sigh.

Oh, well. I hold out hope that this favourite of mine, which was always more numerous in deep water than intertidally, is still down there, outbreeding the plague.

(Photo courtesy of D. Gordon E. Robertson and Wikimedia Commons.)

Good News on the Starfish Front

Not Pisaster brevispinus, unfortunately.

(Update, 15 September 2021: my report of a mature Pisaster brevispinus in this survey was sadly premature. See correction.)

So after a down year due to COVID lockdown, I got in not one but three Annual Puget Sound Asteroid surveys this year. And the news is brilliant!

The first took place at a bay on the Canada-US Border, where two old friends and I have searched for hardy echinoderms since the arrival of the climate disruption-related sea star wasting disease (SSWD) about ten years ago. There we'd previously noted a small but tenacious community of Pisaster ochraceus, the once-ubiquitous ochre star that had seemingly disappeared from all points south, both pelagic and thalassic.

But now they've gone bananas. As we probed crevices and rocky groins in the lower tidal zone, we found seam after seam stuffed with adult P. ochraceus, in numbers reminiscent of the pre-plague days.

Nor was that all. A subsequent hike along Bellingham Bay, a few miles south, fetched up many more, lying around in jaded profusion as if they owned the place.

With unrestrained delight we documented this turn of events in a wealth of celebratory photos.

Pisaster ochraceus.

And this is not, I soon learned, an isolated case. Another visit to the other beach I've been monitoring, near the southern extreme of the Sound 150 miles distant, produced not only several healthy adult Evasterias troscheli, where before I'd only found juveniles, but also an able-bodied adult P. ochraceus, luxuriating the warm plague-friendly austral shallows. And best of all, the first appearance of a robust Pisaster brevispinus!

That last was truly exciting, owing to the long relationship I've had with the North Pacific giant pink sea star. When I was three years old, my uncle and a neighbour girl – young adults both, and divers – disappeared below the inlet in front of my grandmother's house and resurfaced with a great glistening pale monstrosity. They propped it up, tall as I was, on the beach in front of me, and I watched its rows of tube feet wave in phlegmatic bewilderment at the sudden change of world.

This lasted all of five minutes, after which they returned the perplexed fellow to the saltchuck, but the moment remains sharp in memory, now six decades gone.

A few years later I rowed the same bay, hip pressed against the port gunwale, head craned over the rail to peruse the creatures on the bottom. The further out I rowed, the fewer I could discern, until at last only great green bands of sea lettuce were visible in the depths, alternating with bare grey sand.

And then nothing.

Except… here and there, the ghostly undulating skeletal hands of yard-wide P. brevispinus, glowing up through 100 feet of green water.

So the disappearance of my old friend truly hurt, and I fairly cried when I found this one.

Evasterias troschelii.

As it happens, I'm not the only observer of this uptick. As early as 2018, a grad student at UC Merced noted genetic variances in local P. ochraceus populations that allowed a durable nucleus to survive after the great majority had perished. At the time her department wondered aloud whether a similar evolutionary reserve might bail out other species as well.

And so it seems. The single blue note here is the continued absence of great sunflower of death Pycnopodia helianthoides, the final Puget Sound regular still absent. (Though I didn't survey for Leptasterias hexactis, the tiny six-rayed star that lives under rocks, so can't comment on its status.) Marine biologists have suggested that Pycnopodia – soft, squishy, easily penetrated and dissolved by SSWD – may be extinct in our waters.

But I hold out hope that a breeding population, sheltered in colder, deeper fathoms, will one day repopulate its ancestors' old range.

SSWD-resistant Dermasterias imbricata, still very present in the South Sound, as it's been since the beginning.

WW: Blinded sphinx moth

(Paonias excaecatus.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Slime python

(This is Ariolimax columbianus, the Pacific banana slug. With a maximum length just south of ten inches, it's the second-largest slug species on the planet, though this individual is only about 7.)

WW: Whelk eggs

(Almost certainly the invasive Ocinebrellus inornatus, or Japanese oyster drill. I'm told the pink ones have died before hatching.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Shells

the world is my cloister
except when it's my oyster
for then I cannot roister
because it's so much moister


(Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com and a generous photographer.)

WW: Repurposed bird feeder

WW: Starfish report, 2019

(Well, here we are again, on the same beach as last year. This summer I had difficulty finding many Evasterias; total count was only two. However, I did find an adolescent Pisaster ochraceus (photo above), which is heartening. Meanwhile, Dermasterias, which is resistant to the starfish plague, continues much in evidence. I didn't find many Henricia either, but they're not technically intertidal, and the tide wasn't as low as last year. And as in the past, not a single Pycnopodia, profuse in these quiet North Coast waters when I was a kid.

The lack of Evasterias compared to recent post-plague years, and the small size of those found, continue to sound a knell for this species. However, there remain two slim hopes.

First, the very low census still adds up to more than Pycnopodia , now apparently extinct here.

And second, though it appears that all our young Evasterias still succumb within a year or two to the plague, so far a handful are still turning up on the tidelands each summer.

So a healthy breeding population must survive in deeper, colder water. With any luck they'll outlive the virus, and eventually repopulate the bay.)

WW: Burrowing sea cucumber

(Leptosynapta clarki)