Tribe and Scientists Race to Save Sunflower Sea Stars

On a blustery spring morning in the San Juan Islands, a Samish Indian Nation research boat carried precious cargo: 20 endangered sunflower sea stars, raised by hand in a University of Washington laboratory and destined for release into the wild. The April 2026 outplanting marked a milestone in an unprecedented conservation effort to bring the 24-armed creature back from the brink of extinction after a devastating underwater pandemic killed billions of sea stars along the Pacific Coast.

“I’ve had dreams about this day. I’ve had nightmares about this day,” Samish Nation biologist Sam Strauss told NPR. “Many things have already gone wrong that I didn’t anticipate, and I’m sure there will be a couple more.”

A Deadly Outbreak

Sunflower sea stars (Pycnopodia helianthoides) are the largest sea stars in the world, growing more than 3 feet wide with up to 24 arms. They are also the fastest, cruising the seabed at up to 5 feet per minute in search of sea urchins and sea cucumbers. As apex predators of the sea floor, they are considered a keystone species whose presence or absence can reshape entire ecosystems.

But beginning in 2013, sea star wasting disease swept along the West Coast from northern Mexico to Alaska, affecting more than 20 species. The disease dissolves sea stars into goo, contorting their arms before they fall off completely. An estimated 5 billion sunflower stars — roughly 90% of the global population — were lost.

“We definitely have lost a lot of sea stars,” University of Washington research scientist Jason Hodin said. “We’ve lost 90% of our sunflower stars, we think.” Hodin runs the sea star lab at the university’s Friday Harbor Laboratories.

For more than a decade, the cause of the disease remained a mystery. Then in August 2025, an international research team including scientists from the University of Washington, the Hakai Institute, and the University of British Columbia identified the culprit: a strain of the bacterium Vibrio pectenicida. The discovery, published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, was hailed as “the discovery of the decade” by UW affiliate professor Drew Harvell, who noted that the bacteria “doesn’t show up on histology like other bacteria do,” according to UW News.

Researchers say ocean heat waves, amplified by climate change, helped the bacteria thrive. The loss of sunflower stars has triggered a trophic cascade: sea urchin populations have exploded, devastating kelp forests that protect coastlines and nurture species like salmon and orcas.

“When we lose billions of sea stars, that really shifts the ecological dynamics,” said Melanie Prentice, an evolutionary ecologist at the Hakai Institute and UBC. “In the absence of sunflower stars, sea urchin populations increase, which means the loss of kelp forests, and that has broad implications for all the other marine species and humans that rely on them.”

A Collaborative Rescue

International scientists declared the sunflower star critically endangered on the IUCN Red List, and Canada declared it endangered. The Biden administration proposed protecting the species under the Endangered Species Act in 2023, but the Trump administration has not acted on that proposal. In June, the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity sued to force protections.

Meanwhile, scientists and the Samish Indian Nation have taken matters into their own hands. Hodin began a captive breeding program at Friday Harbor Laboratories in 2019 with funding from The Nature Conservancy. By trial and error, researchers figured out how to breed these little-studied animals, raising them from microscopic larvae to adults as big as stop signs.

The lab’s stars are individually named — the released cohort was called the “snack pack,” with names like Nacho, Baby Carrot, and Pluot. Research assistant Julia Knopf described the emotional bond: “I do feel like a parent. You raise them, you take care of them, you want the best for them, but then you know the best for them is letting them go out in the wild, just like letting your kid go out into the world.”

The release was initially planned for October 2025 but was called off when divers found wasting disease surging throughout the San Juans. Six months later, on April 14, 2026, the Samish research boat R/V Chinook (Yómech) set out again from Anacortes, carrying four sloshing tubs of stars to a sheltered cove off Decatur Island.

“Pool’s open!” boat captain Elena Fischer announced as divers prepared to descend.

Divers carefully swam the tubs to the sea floor and pulled the lids off, waiting for the sunflower stars to glide to freedom. “They left their bins incredibly quickly and started exploring the environment and finding different rocks to hang out on and kelp fronds to hide under,” Strauss said.

By May, divers found 14 of the 20 released stars with no signs of disease — a success. The site had been inundated with fresh kelp growth. In a separate effort, Hodin’s lab released thousands of poppy-seed-sized juvenile sunflower stars off San Juan Island to test whether that approach might be more efficient than raising them to maturity in tanks.

Protecting a Kelp Goddess

For the Samish Indian Nation, the effort to save sunflower stars is deeply intertwined with cultural identity. The tribe’s connection to kelp forests goes back millennia — the Samish believe a deity named Ko-Kwal-Alwoot, a young woman who married the king of the sea, protects their people, her hair turned to long fronds of bull kelp.

“If you look into the water, you’ll see the bull kelp swirling around in the tide. That’s her out there,” Samish tribal chair Tom Wooten said. “That’s her hair, letting us know that she’s still there.”

Sunflower stars protect kelp by preying on kelp-eating sea urchins. “That’s why those starfish are so important, because they munch those green urchins!” Wooten said. “You need those predators.”

The Samish Indian Nation Department of Natural Resources closely monitors local kelp forests and, in February 2026, replanted a kelp bed — a first for the San Juan Islands. The tribe has documented a 36% decline in kelp forest acreage in the archipelago, according to Salish Current.

A Tribe Rebuilding

The conservation work is also part of the Samish tribe’s broader effort to build a home for itself. The tribe signed the Treaty of Point Elliott in 1855 but never received a reservation. In 1969, a clerical error at the Bureau of Indian Affairs left the Samish off a list of federally recognized tribes, and it took 27 years to regain recognition. Because they were unrecognized in 1974, the Samish were excluded from the Boldt decision that granted Washington tribes rights to half the fish and shellfish in their traditional areas — a right they still lack.

“We were scattered to the winds, and we’re in an effort to bring people back home,” Wooten said.

The tribe has been buying land, developing low-income housing, and restoring habitats on land and at sea. To help fight the climate change making ocean life more susceptible to disease, the Samish commissioned a zero-emission, electric research boat, with delivery expected in 2027.

“It’s really nature that we live in,” Wooten said. “We have to do what we can to preserve, protect, and restore that to have a place to come home to.”

What’s Next

A dozen labs up and down the West Coast are currently raising sunflower stars, with small releases planned later this year in California and Oregon. Researchers say the Decatur Island release was a pilot project to figure out what works before scaling up.

It is unlikely biologists will ever raise anything close to the 5 billion sunflower stars lost to wasting disease. But they hope to raise enough to point the species — and the kelp forests it protects — toward recovery.

“It really feels like there’s a groundswell,” Hodin told Salish Current. “It’s what’s needed in order to be able to address it, so I’m feeling pretty hopeful. It’s an incredibly collaborative group of people that are really focused on the ecological problem primarily, and that’s really heartening.”

As the released stars explore their new home in the kelp forests off Decatur Island, researchers and tribal members alike are watching closely — hopeful that these 24-armed creatures, once nearly lost, can find their place again in the Pacific ecosystem.