In this episode of FieldSound, we take you to UW Friday Harbor Laboratories in the San Juan Islands, where marine researchers Olivia Graham and Joey Ullman prepare for a dive on a cold January morning. They scout sites for deploying juvenile sunflower stars, aiming to compare the survivability of lab-grown versus wild-caught specimens.
Fiona Curliss, another researcher, discusses the intricate process of raising these sea stars, from fertilization to adulthood, and the importance of their work in combating sea star wasting syndrome.
Learn about the research that is being conducted at UW Friday Harbor Labs, which provides an ideal environment for studying the marine environment. Faculty and researchers from the University of Washington and beyond gather at FHL to explore oceanography, chemistry, biology, ecology and other marine sciences. Students have the chance to engage deeply in research and coursework, linking classroom knowledge to the ecosystems of the San Juan Archipelago.
Watch a video about FHL’s sea star rearing efforts.
The project recently was featured on NBC’s ‘Wild Kingdom’ show.
Full episode transcript
Sarah Smith
From the University of Washington. College of the environment. This is Field Sound.
00;00;24;10 – 00;01;10;03
Joey Ullman
This is a normal thing. People do.
Sarah Smith
It’s a cold January morning in the San Juan Islands.
Joey Ullman
We always get calls.
Sarah Smith
I can see the breath of two scientific divers, Joey and Olivia, as they prepare for their dive.
Joey Ullman
We are. Scouting cage deployment sites for our subtitle out. Planting of juvenile Pycnopodia helianthoides. And that is so we can compare the survivability of our lab grown stars, to that of wild caught, juvenile picnic podia.
00;01;10;05 – 00;01;24;11
Joey Ullman
So we can, continue rearing them in lab and hopefully get to the point where we can start releasing them.
00;01;24;13 – 00;01;54;15
Joey Ullman
A little over a dozen buildings nestled in the evergreen forest. Host research and teaching laboratories. They’re fed by a specially designed system delivering seawater to aquaria and water tables for the back in the tree line, cabins and dorms, a mess hall Friday Harbor Labs is a world renowned research and education center located a few hours north of Seattle.
00;01;54;18 – 00;02;19;04
Joey Ullman
These are called sunflower stars and their scientific name is Pycnopodia helianthoides outside lab one are tanks filled with giant, colorful, multi limbed sea stars. So one of the coolest things about these guys, they’re some of the fastest sea stars in the world. So like the sea stars, you would see, like on a rocky shore, like the okra, a star or something like that are usually really slow.
00;02;19;04 – 00;02;40;00
Joey Ullman
Like you’ll never be able to. They’re moving, like, almost invisibly. but these guys, when you drop a muscle in the tank, they will crawl over. they they can even once they know that we’re feeding them, they’ll crawl up to the surface and extend all their arms out and kind of catch the muscles as they fall. So, yeah, they have this really interesting behavior.
00;02;40;02 – 00;03;08;01
Joey Ullman
Wow. Pycnopodia helianthoides live in low intertidal and subtitle zones along the Pacific coast from Alaska to San Diego. They can grow up to a remarkable 39in from arm tip to arm tip. They’re voracious predators for sea stars.
Fiona Curliss
Anyway, I’m Fiona Curtis and I’m one of Jason Houghton’s research assistants. so I work in the Captive Star rearing program, which is working on captive rearing.
00;03;08;01 – 00;03;30;06
Fiona Curliss
The sunflower star or, Pycnopodia helianthoides, if you want to do the fancy name. so we’re currently trying to. Well, succeeded. Actually, we have a lot of juveniles. We have 108 ish juveniles from last year. So they are about 2 to 5cm. So they’re very small and cute at the size. and then for the previous year we have 23.
00;03;30;06 – 00;03;51;02
Fiona Curliss
And from the year before that we have 12. So we’ve gotten a lot better over time. and the goal I think is eventually that we will be releasing them into wild, but we have many, many stages of experiments before then.
Sarah Smith
The lab is essentially an aquatic nursery. There’s these vibrant green vials of liquid bubbling away, and it kind of looks a bit like a mad scientist lab.
00;03;51;04 – 00;04;22;10
Sarah Smith
There’s tanks filled with tiny urchins and sea stars, and they’re all awaiting feeding time. Sea star populations have rapidly declined since 2013. Disease, specifically sea star wasting syndrome, appears to be a primary threat to the species, but an exact cause for the diminishing numbers remains unknown.
Fiona Curliss
so my job is that we basically care for them through their entire life cycle, which means from fertilization all the way through adulthood.
00;04;22;12 – 00;04;44;26
Fiona Curliss
So we have, captive broodstock colonies, sort of what we call them, that are wild caught Pycnopodia that were caught from the San Juan Islands. they were actually very painstakingly collected by many divers over many, many, many hours. and we take care of them and those are the parents for all of the babies that we have.
00;04;44;28 – 00;05;08;17
Fiona Curliss
so you’re actually here a week before fertilization. So fertilization is happening next week. And so that starts the process that, I was had a lot of good training for when I came to this job, which is all the embryology stuff, because these guys stay as larva in the plankton, floating around, feeding on little tiny microalgae for about 45 to 60 days, depending on the temperature.
00;05;08;17 – 00;05;30;05
Fiona Curliss
So a very long time. And we have to care for them that entire time through their development as larva and then, metamorphose. We start caring for them as like tiny, tiny, tiny little juveniles. They’re they’re half a millimeter when they settle. So getting them to larger sizes is feels very good. And then after that, after a certain point, it’s a lot lower maintenance.
00;05;30;05 – 00;05;44;29
Fiona Curliss
Like, we really have to worry about them when they’re small. and we spent a lot of time raising food because that’s the thing about when you, are raising predators, you also need to raise their prey. Yeah.
00;05;45;02 – 00;06;06;01
Augie Kalytiak-Davis
My name is Auggie. I. Well, I’m from Alaska, so I grew up in the sort of Pacific Northwest adjacent. Then I went to school in Williamsburg, Virginia, and I started doing research on sea stars, and I thought it was really cool. Two days after I graduated, I started working in Friday Harbor. Like the little plate you put a little cup of espresso on.
00;06;06;01 – 00;06;24;16
Augie Kalytiak-Davis
I don’t know what that plate’s called, but maybe about that size. So that’s how. And yeah, it
Fiona Curliss
this lab is a particular project. I had never seen an adult sunflower star until I came to the labs, despite the fact that I had done what I consider to be a fair amount of tide pooling in Oregon during my classes there, as well as in my free time.
00;06;24;18 – 00;06;54;16
Fiona Curliss
And so it’s very rewarding to like, think that like, I will help hopefully put this species back to my home. And that would be really lovely. The mystery is basically that they were extremely abundant before sea star wasting disease outbreak in 2013 2014. and like many things, we take them for granted when they’re very abundant. They don’t get studied a lot because they’re always there and there’s so many of them, and there’s many species like this.
00;06;54;19 – 00;07;25;05
Fiona Curliss
And so when they their population was dropping drastically and in some places, it’s functionally extinct. we looked around and realized we didn’t really have a lot in the literature about them. We knew very little. and also I just far as I know we’re sort of one of the first large scale, like trying to rear sea stars all the way through, because a lot of folks, if you have a short end, this is just a function of the way academia works.
00;07;25;07 – 00;07;42;26
Fiona Curliss
you’ll come to the station for a field season. So spring through summer, and then you’ll end up with, like, you have to fit your experiments in that time frame. And like, obviously, we have these experiments been going on for years for us. So we’ve been really fortunate that we can do that and raise them all the way through.
00;07;42;28 – 00;08;01;24
Fiona Curliss
but the mystery is that we just didn’t know so much. I mean, like, there was a lot of stuff we found that either has changed in the literature, like even the size of their eggs was different than what we were finding. there was lots and lots of stuff that people were like. Well, they were like, how do you know how old a star is?
00;08;01;24 – 00;08;19;28
Fiona Curliss
And we were like, we don’t know. We have no idea. People ask us questions all the time where I was like, we don’t technically know that yet. We’re working on it.
Fiona Curliss
And then they come down to the bottom of the sea, and they do a kind of metamorphosis, like a caterpillar into a butterfly type deal. But unlike a caterpillar and a butterfly, they don’t have like a cocoon.
00;08;19;28 – 00;08;37;14
Fiona Curliss
They just have to spontaneously do it. So it’s even kind of crazier, even though no one really thinks about sea stars when they think about metamorphosis. and then they’re like the size of, like, a poppy seed, and then they grow up to this size over a year. So you think these guys are little, but to me, these guys are, like, gigantic.
00;08;37;17 – 00;08;55;16
Fiona Curliss
Yeah. I love my job. I like say it to myself. Some like when I got this call, the call was like my dream job. It was really, really extraordinary. And I was very excited. It’s really rewarding to watch the juveniles grow, like the 108 from last year were ones that I was there for fertilization, and I raised them.
00;08;55;16 – 00;09;21;01
Fiona Curliss
And so I was like, well, all the babies. Like, there are some really cool parts about being a full time sea star parent. and it’s really wonderful. Like we our lab in particular has like a lot of collaborators, we get to talk with a lot of aquariums and zoos that are in California and Oregon and Washington, and I’ve really enjoyed, like, the wealth of knowledge that I can learn from other people in this field that’s been really, really cool.
00;09;21;03 – 00;09;39;18
Fiona Curliss
And also that we’re in my job description, at least in our lab, I’m given some freedom to, look into things that like I think are interesting, like there’s lots of stuff like we have main experiment goals in the lab, but if I have time for a little side experiment because I’m curious about it, I can do it.
00;09;39;21 – 00;10;01;00
Fiona Curliss
And that’s been really cool. there’s there’s a lot about the job that like, every day you’re not entirely sure what you’re going to end up doing that day. I ended up sorting through a lot of clams yesterday, which was not exactly on my agenda, but that’s okay. but I really like it. It’s it’s really wonderful to be able to, I call it talk shop with people all the time.
00;10;01;00 – 00;10;15;28
Fiona Curliss
Like, that’s my favorite part of this job, probably beyond all the very cute sea stars.
00;10;16;01 – 00;10;40;15
Adam Summers,
For many, many years, to relax, I would walk in the intertidal. In the summer the tides are low. In the morning. Mist is rising off the water in front of the labs. And I go down there and I’d walk amongst the rocks and flip them over. Because I’m a fish guy. I love fishes, and up here in the intertidal you can flip a rock and find a fish.
00;10;40;18 – 00;11;08;05
Adam Summers,
You don’t have to go with a net. There are just fish under the rocks. And there’s also this, a magnificent fish that sticks to the rocks with a belly sucker. So this thing has a giant suction cup on its belly, and you’d flip a rock and there would be a northern curling fish go by. The socks meander, and it is like, you know, finding a present to finding at a brand new shiny quarry.
00;11;08;06 – 00;11;32;00
Adam Summers,
You reach down, you pick that thing up, and inevitably, it’d be really stuck to the rock. Really, well, stuck. And when it realized you wanted it, it would try and stick itself down harder. Looking to the sea for bio inspiration is sort of what we do, and our tools are things like scanning electron microscopes and, CT machines, computed tomography machines.
00;11;32;03 – 00;12;00;05
Adam Summers,
these allow us to learn the shape in three dimensions, and then we can print models and actuate the models and see what it really takes to do what the fish is doing.
Sarah Smith
Adam Sommers applies simple engineering and mathematics concepts to how animals make their way in the natural world. He seems to find a spark in exploring an interesting biological problem by challenging what he describes as his engineering intuition.
00;12;00;10 – 00;12;31;09
Adam Summers,
And here we all do it. everybody from the undergrads, from high school students that I have come in to undergrads to to grad students and postdocs. It’s just the opportunity to work on topics that interest you with a great deal of freedom. and in an atmosphere where so the amount of work you do is your business, the end product, what you produce totally in your hands.
00;12;31;11 – 00;12;52;09
Olivia Graham
My name is Olivia Graham, and I’m a postdoctoral research associate technically with Cornell, but there’s no seagrass in upstate New York. So I do all of my work out here. and so I work with Doctor Drew Herbal, also at Cornell, and we’re studying seagrass wasting disease in the Salish Sea. So just like humans, plants and animals obviously can get sick, too.
00;12;52;12 – 00;13;12;23
Olivia Graham
And often I feel like that’s out of sight, out of mind for things in our oceans. but for seagrass, specifically our local eelgrass sister, Morena, it can be infected by a slime mold like protist. And it’s called, labyrinthia zoster. And this is a really cool pathogen, in part because we can culture it. And so we know what the pathogen is.
00;13;12;23 – 00;13;29;17
Olivia Graham
We can culture isolate it. And that allows us to do really controlled infection experiments in lab. so it allows us a lot of flexibility, especially compared to other marine diseases where we don’t really know what the causative agent is.
00;13;29;19 – 00;14;10;01
Sarah Smith
Microscopes line clean counter cultures in petri dishes live inside a big, boxy fridge. We’re talking about pathogens, but Olivia’s enthusiasm is what’s infectious.
Olivia Graham
Oh, yes, eelgrass is so, so important. And as you can probably tell, this is something I love talking about. because. And that’s not true just for our Salish Sea. but also worldwide, too, because eelgrass is found throughout the Northern hemisphere in these shallow coastal waters, and it helps from, sediment stabilization, helps buffer coastlines against intense wave action, which we had a ton last night and this morning.
00;14;10;03 – 00;14;27;27
Olivia Graham
but it also creates valuable homes for lots of baby animals. Salmon and herring perch, as well as tons of invertebrates, too. and so I always think that if people don’t really care about feel grass, maybe they at least care about our southern resident killer whales, which feed on salmon. And the babies grew up in eelgrass meadows.
00;14;27;29 – 00;14;52;29
Olivia Graham
So in many ways it all comes back to eelgrass. But they’re really valuable. also for, filtering the seawater, too. and carbon sequestration too, if you compare the same size area of a seagrass meadow to the rainforest, the seagrass meadow is much more efficient at sequestering carbon than the rainforest is, too. So they’re really valuable in helping fight climate change.
00;14;53;02 – 00;15;14;24
Olivia Graham
So I was here as, post back student back in 2014, and I was studying Pacific Sand lands, and at the time it was much like this. It’s cold and windy and wet. And I shuffled into the dining hall, was making a cup of hot cocoa, and this rich researcher shuffles over and he had, like a long braid going down his back, little blue earring and a green beret.
00;15;14;24 – 00;15;34;28
Olivia Graham
So I met Sandy, doctor Sandy Wiley Echevarria, seagrass researcher here at the labs. Anyway, long story short, I got to know him. He did an environmental ethics seminar group with some of my other friends who are here that quarter. And then he asked me to stick around as a research assistant in his lab afterwards. So here they are.
00;15;35;01 – 00;15;55;18
Sandy Wylie Echeverria
These are the seeds down in these Aquarius. So these are the different collections. This is some false bay. for 4th of July need. Sorry. These seeds were collected in, Earth upper intertidal. Those seeds in the subtitle. And then this last one is the Padilla name. And you can see the little fellows in there, you know, seeds.
00;15;55;20 – 00;16;21;28
Sandy Wylie Echeverria
And we put it when I came down from Alaska, I started working here at the it was called the School of Marine Affairs. And I started a group called the Interdisciplinary Seagrass Working Group. And we published a little booklet in 1994, about seagrass science and policy in the Pacific Northwest, and then just started working more and working with other people as a research scientist at the U-dub.
00;16;22;01 – 00;16;40;02
Sandy Wylie Echeverria
And this keeps a pretty constant temperature outside of the four degrees C. Yeah. And they’ll be here until planting in March. Oh, wow. I come up every day and check them. They’re in. My friends look up. What do you talk to them? And I tell you,
Sarah Smith
I can tell you have a lot of passion for working with students.
00;16;40;02 – 00;16;58;25
Sandy Wylie Echeverria
I do, yeah, I do. They have lots of energy, young energy. They’re interested in things. They seem to be more and more. There are a lot more capable than I was at their age, a lot more capable. And they bring in new ideas. like storyboards. I never would have thought of that before, but that’s a way to present your science.
00;16;58;27 – 00;17;20;02
Sandy Wylie Echeverria
So I like that. And this place is becoming theirs, right? The earth, they they need to move into positions of authority and responsibility. And they are ready to do that.
00;17;20;04 – 00;17;42;25
Sandy Wylie Echeverria
Oh my gosh, that was huge. Yeah. We got a little slime star for the class.
Sarah Smith
Our time on the boat is up. Show and tell for local elementary kids. It’s happening later today. It’s was the service. Yeah, yeah. That’s a so slimy. I figured that would be good on this visit to the lab. I keep hearing cars Friday Harbor labs.
00;17;42;27 – 00;18;01;04
Sarah Smith
This is sticky place, and it’s pretty easy to see why. One trip.
00;18;01;06 – 00;18;27;17
Sarah Smith
You can learn more about opportunities for students and researchers at Friday Harbor Labs by visiting FHL.uw.edu. A big thanks to each of the Friday Harbor Labs researchers and staff featured in this podcast, and a special shout out to Mason Wiley for sharing all your time and knowledge, and for coordinating all the interviews. My housekeys, boat adventures.
00;18;27;19 – 00;18;44;16
Sarah Smith
I appreciate it. Thanks for listening. See you next time.
