Frozen sperm could help bring these giant sea stars back from the brink of extinction | 24CA News

Melissa Torres spent her Valentine’s Day serving to to usher new life into the world — within the type of tens of millions of fertilized sea star eggs.

Torres is a part of a crew that, on Feb. 14, efficiently spawned and cross-fertilized sperm and eggs from female and male sunflower sea stars on the Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California. 

It’s a significant step in an enormous effort by scientists, governments and conservationists to save lots of an essential marine species that has been practically annihilated by a mysterious losing illness.

“It was, I will not lie, a lot of jumping and hugging and hooraying and screaming,” Torres, an aquarist at Birch, informed 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.”

A grisly illness

Sunflower sea stars are the most important of the ocean stars, rising up a metre in diametre — or, as Torres says, “as large as an extra large pizza.”

They are available a wide range of vivid colors, and might develop as many as 24 arms, every coated with tiny tube ft they use to scamper throughout the ocean ground.

“They’re so beautiful,” Torrest mentioned. “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 ample within the Pacific Ocean, they’ve been all however worn out within the wild during the last decade by a mysterious losing illness linked to warming ocean temperatures. 

The grisly illness causes sea stars’ limbs to fall off and their our bodies to disintegrate. First reported in 2013, it has since killed greater than 5.7 billion sunflower sea stars — greater than 90 per cent of their inhabitants. 

In southern California, 99 per cent have died, making them functionally extinct. 

This has had devastating results on the ecosystem, which depends on the celebs to eat sea urchins, which, in flip, 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 mentioned.

“And these kelp forests provide not only homes, but food, for animals, as well as carbon sequestration.”

The key ingredient is frozen sperm

Scientists, authorities and conservationists throughout the West Coast have been collaborating to save lots of the ocean stars, utilizing The Nature Conservancy’s “Roadmap to Recovery” as their guiding star.

One key a part of that roadmap is breeding them in captivity, with the hopes of someday releasing them again into the wild.

Until now, that has largely been achieved on the Friday Harbor Laboratories in Washington State, the place a crew led by biologist Jason Hodin is breeding its second era of sunflower sea stars, descendants from survivors of the illness within the Salish Sea.

But state restrictions imply Hodin’s lab cannot simply ship sea stars from Washington to California for reintroduction. 

“That’s where the ecological crisis is the most severe, and so that’s where we need the stars to be bred for actual reintroduction,” Hodin mentioned.

“We consider our efforts up here to be completely complementary and in parallel to what they’re doing down in California, and hopefully supportive.”

On Valentine’s Day, the California crew made its first large breakthrough. They injected two stars, one male and one feminine, with hormones to make them launch clouds of egg and sperm.

They then fertilized the eggs utilizing each recent and frozen sperm from the identical male. 

The means to make use of frozen sperm, Hodin says, is “really vital” in California, the place there are few wild sunflower sea stars left. Those in captivity are unfold out amongst a number of aquariums.

“They want to be able to bring in a significant amount of genetic variation when they set up these experiments,” he mentioned. “So being able to preserve sperm and move it around from place to place and use it on demand is just a really important technique.” 

Alyssa-Lois Gehman, a marine ecologist on the Hakai Institute and the University of British Columbia, referred to as this an “important step” in saving the ocean stars. 

But, she additionally famous, it is “one step of many.” 

Gehman, who research the losing illness, says scientists additionally have to study extra about the way it works, to make sure that future generations of sea stars will not additionally succumb to it and die.

“I think we do have some work to do on that front, just to identify the causative agent and move us towards being able to hopefully control, or at least monitor [the disease] a little bit more carefully,” she mentioned. 

The Birch Aquarium crew, in the meantime, says it has managed to fertilze tens of millions of eggs from its profitable experiment.

They saved some to boost themselves, and shipped the others to the Aquarium of the Pacific, the California Academy of Sciences and different companions throughout the state to boost and breed.

The Birch eggs have reached their larval stage, Torres mentioned, and up to now, they’re “doing great.”