(16 Jun 2025)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
San Francisco – 11 June 2025
1. Various sunflower sea stars living in California Academy of Sciences aquarium tank with Giant Octopus
+++SOUNDBITE PARTIALLY COVERED+++
2. SOUNDBITE (English) Jessica Witherly, Senior Biologist, California Academy of Sciences:
"The sunflower starfish is actually incredibly important. They were recently listed as critically endangered along the California coast by the ICUN list. That means that there’s barely any that you would find in the California Coast where you used to find them all over the place. So whenever you go out to a beach tide pooling, you’d be almost stepping on them. And now you can’t find them anywhere. California has beautiful kelp forests that are habitat to thousands of different animals. And that habitat is being destroyed right now by overpopulation of purple urchins. Those purple urchins normally would get eaten by pycnopodia or sunflower starfish as they eat other echinoderms or starfish and urchins. But because of their decline after the sea star wasting disease multiple years ago, the purple urchin’s population has mass produced and is decimating our kelp forest, destroying habitat for many different species and affecting animals all up and down the California coast. So we collaborated with Alaska Sea Life Center in Seward, Alaska. We went up there where they have over 45 adult individuals and we were able to successfully spawn them. And we have, as you can see, a ton of larvae. So we are growing these up from free-floating larvae to tiny, subtle starfish to much larger juvenile starfish. But the goal here is to get good and kind of break the code about how to mass produce and breed and care for these animals in our care so that then we can reintroduce them back into the wild to see surges of their numbers along the west coast."
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Mendocino County, California – 30 September 2023
3. Underwater footage of purple urchins covering the sea floor
4. Underwater footage of diver smashing purple urchin
5. Diver holds harvested purple urchins
ASSOCIATED PRESS
San Francisco – 11 June 2025
6. Shipping container with "live animals" written on it
7. Various sea star larvae in containers and being examined with microscope
8. Various young sunflower sea stars being moved into bigger tanks
9. Two fully grown sunflower sea stars in public tank on display
STORYLINE:
In a breakthrough for marine conservation, scientists at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco are successfully spawning and raising critically endangered sunflower sea stars in captivity, an effort that could help restore the species in the wild.
Once decimated by sea star wasting disease, sunflower sea stars lost more than 90% of their population in just a decade.
But now, after years of research, biologists have learned to breed them, and are building up captive populations for future reintroduction along California’s coast.
Three fully mature stars, recently brought from Alaska, are now on public display at the Academy’s Steinhart Aquarium, where visitors can witness these giant predators, some growing up to three feet across.
These sea stars are not just captivating.
They play a vital role in controlling sea urchin populations that threaten California’s kelp forests, a crucial carbon sink and biodiversity hotspot.
Three other California aquariums are also now caring for sunflower sea stars.
And this year, at least four were spotted off the Mendocino coast, marking a hopeful sign of natural return.
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