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.