MOSS LANDING >> Sunflower sea stars are nearly extinct in Monterey Bay. But at the Sunflower Star Lab in Moss Landing, a group of 1-year-olds are growing and thriving.

On Valentine’s Day 2024, the “Cupid Cohort” of sunflower stars was spawned at Birch Aquarium in San Diego before moving into the Sunflower Sea Star Laboratory in Moss Landing. Now, the lab is gearing up to celebrate the first birthday or “Spawniversary” of the 72 babies with an art fair and guided tours of the lab space on Friday.

With the current Cupid Cohort, lab staff have been able to research more about these keystone species. Eventually, the team hopes for a return of these stars to Monterey Bay, where they can help maintain kelp forests, which are declining at a fast pace.

The event, which takes place from 3-6 p.m. at 10930 Salmon Way in Moss Landing, is a chance for sunflower star fans to celebrate their favorite echinoderms. The free event will feature art and photography by artists who have supported the lab, as well as tours to see the baby sea stars. Signups for lab tour time slots are available online at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/secure-your-time-to-visit-the-stars-of-the-show-tickets-1236792422429?aff=oddtdtcreator.

“Make sure that you come early,” said Ashley Kidd, conservation aquaculture project manager at the lab. The lab will take signups for lab tours on a first-come, first-served basis.

The event will celebrate not only the stars, but the community that has formed around them. “We’ve been driven by an outpouring of support,” said Kidd. Most of the lab’s funding has come from small private donations. Volunteers and artists have also lent their time and work to the project. Enthusiasm for sunflower stars has spread among the ocean enthusiasts that Moss Landing already attracts. Fans sport stickers, shirts and hats featuring the many-legged invertebrate, Kidd said.

“We just want to give an opportunity for the community to check (the stars) out,” Kidd said. “And maybe we can rub off our nerdy excitement.”

Sunflower stars can live for up to 65 years, according to the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach. The largest of the Cupid Cohort is only 10 centimeters across — adults can grow to be a meter wide.

For Kidd and Vince Christian, the lab manager, the one-year milestone is proof that this project can really work. “California has the capacity and institutional knowledge to do this,” Kidd said.

Sunflower stars weren’t heavily researched before they began to disappear in 2014. Together with collaborators like the Aquarium of the Pacific and the San Diego Zoo, the lab had to figure out how to tell males and females apart, how to prompt the stars to spawn and how to care for them in their larval and then juvenile stages. The process was “like throwing spaghetti at a wall,” Kidd said. Now, the lab is learning how to control the stars’ growth and gaining insights on their behavior. As they collaborate with marine researchers and aquariums across California, they hope to develop resources to grow sunflower stars at a larger scale.

Despite the lack of knowledge about sunflower stars when the lab began, the past year of keeping the stars happy has been relatively smooth sailing, Christian said. The lab had a scare when the larval stars began devouring their siblings. But after separating them, they have remained happy. “I’m always nervous,” Christian said. He worried that a pontoon explosion that shattered the lab’s skylights or the recent battery plant fire right across the street would affect the animals. Even after these disasters, the stars, which are kept individually in small tanks, are doing fine. “They’re pretty hardy,” Christian said.

Before 2014, Sunflower sea stars were thriving in Monterey Bay. “I’ve been diving here for the last 30, 35 years and I witnessed them first hand disappear,” Christian said. “You used to see them every single dive and then all of a sudden they’re gone.” The mysterious disease, called sea star wasting disease, has persisted at low levels in most areas in Monterey Bay and continues to kill sea stars. Sunflower sea stars prey on urchins, helping maintain a healthy kelp ecosystem.

Since 2013, the sea stars have almost gone extinct in the oceans, causing the sea urchin to overgraze the kelp forests, leading to its decline. “Some of my favorite dive sites were these beautiful, healthy kelp forests,” Christian said. Now, many of those areas are urchin barrens: Rocks covered in urchins that have gobbled up all the kelp. Most predators won’t touch these undernourished urchins — except sunflower stars.

Kelp forests provide home to thousands of different marine species. Now, after a year of a successful maintenance of the sea stars in the laboratory Kidd said, “We are doing this all in service of the ecosystem restoration efforts, we are not just trying to restore a species, but a part of a greater kelp forest restoration initiative.”

It will be a long time before any of the lab’s stars are put back into the wild, though. For one, scientists still don’t know much about sea star wasting disease, and thus, how to protect sunflower stars from it in the wild. Plus, the Cupid Cohort are all siblings. If they were to be released, the sunflower star population would lack genetic diversity, leading to even more complications. Still, someday, all of the lab members would love to see the stars in the sea once again.

“It would be heartwarming to see them crawling across the kelp cove,” Christian said.

Along with private donations, the lab is also supported through the NOAA Transformational Habitat and Coastal Resilience Restoration Program and the Nature Conservancy’s Pacific Coast Ocean Restoration Initiative, of which the Sunflower Star Lab is one of 13 sub-awardees.

Monterey Bay is a huge tourist attraction for ocean lovers of all types. “We’ve integrated really well into this community,” Kidd said. “We’re just another interesting nerdy aspect of that ocean appreciation that people come here for.”

“The thing I’m most proud of about this whole project, is that it truly is a community project,” Christian said. Together, through science, art, and community, the lab is not just restoring a species but rebuilding an ecosystem, one tiny sea star at a time.