Twenty tiny predators – the first of their kind bred in captivity and released into the wild – now crawl around the San Juan Islands.

The colorful sea creatures are called sunflower stars. They are the fastest of all starfish and are considered the most endangered.

A mysterious, wasting disease has killed an estimated five billion of these animals, or 90 percent of their global population, over the past decade, destroying underwater ecosystems from Alaska to Baja California.

Researchers at the University of Washington have been breeding the multi-legged bottom dwellers in seawater tanks at the Friday Harbor Laboratories on San Juan Island since 2019.

In July and August, that effort brought the first real benefit to the endangered species. Divers lowered two plastic tubs, each containing ten animals, onto a seagrass meadow off the laboratory’s dock in Friday Harbor on San Juan Island.

The animals, all between one and three years old and ranging in size from a biscuit to a dinner plate, slid out of the tubs on thousands of suction cups and into the surrounding kelp and seagrass.

“They were basically crawling over each other to get out,” said researcher Jason Hodin. “It was like they had never been in the wild before, but they couldn’t wait to get out and explore.”

Hodin’s lab had captured adult sunflower stars in the wild, mated them, and raised the offspring from microscopic larvae into tiny living stars.

“We are releasing stars that were born and raised entirely in captivity, and that has never been done before,” Hodin said. “We are the only lab that has raised these stars in captivity.”

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In February, three stars were successfully bred at the Birch Aquarium in California – a state where sunflower star numbers have fallen by 99% – and several aquariums have begun rearing the invisibly small larvae.

It takes about three years for them to reach sexual maturity and they can live up to 65 years.

“This effort is finally getting underway. It’s very exciting,” Hodin said.

Of course, a few dozen sunflower seeds are just a drop in the ocean compared to the billions that melted away in one of the worst wildlife pandemics in history.

“Such large numbers were affected over such a large area that captive breeding is probably not realistic to restore populations,” said Bellingham-based researcher Melissa Miner of the University of California, Santa Cruz. “Raising them to subadult size takes a lot of time and resources.”

“That won’t happen in our small lab in Friday Harbor, Washington,” Hodin said. “But we can show how a larger facility or network of facilities in a place like California could grow sufficient numbers of stars for repopulation.”

A shorter-term goal, Hodin said, could be to target local hotspots where the lack of sea urchins as prey can unchecked and devastate kelp forests, destroying an important habitat for many marine creatures.

“Introducing celebrities to a region to do environmental work there could actually be quite effective,” Hodin said.

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“It’s a useful tool to have in the conservation arsenal,” Miner said.

Researchers in Washington state and elsewhere are still searching for the causes of the wasting disease that has turned 20 species of starfish into slime — and continues to do so — across the West Coast.

“It’s still at a low level and flaring up in places,” Miner said.

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The ochre star, once a dominant predator of west coast tidal pools, has recovered from extinction across much of its range.

Surveys of tide pools near Neah Bay in 2024 found that a much smaller species, the six-rayed starfish, was heavily infected.

“It’s quite common that at any given time, one species is more affected than others,” she said.

In 2020, the sunflower star was classified as “critically endangered” by biologists at the International Union for Conservation of Nature; it was the first starfish to receive this unfortunate status.

Neither the U.S. nor the Canadian government has granted the sunflower star endangered species protection.

In 2021, the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity petitioned the National Marine Fisheries Service to list the sunflower star as an endangered species. The agency is expected to make its decision in 2025.

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If the causes of wasting disease are not known, there is a risk that it will spread through the release of laboratory-bred animals into the wild.

Hodin said his lab and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife have agreed on a protocol to prevent the release of sick animals. The lab monitors its stars daily for several weeks for early signs of illness before releasing them.

Sunflower stars hold their arms differently when they are desperate.

“We call it wave arm,” Hodin said.

Treating sick stars with iodine baths and cold water, a protocol developed at the Oregon Coast Aquarium, has helped restore several animals to health.

Divers examine the released animals daily and Hodin is trying to train a computer to recognize photos of each individual animal.

Adult starfish – often almost the size of a garbage can lid – can be easily distinguished from one another, Hodin says, similar to how whale researchers can identify individual orcas by the pattern on their backs.

While the newly released one- and two-year-old sunflower stars do not yet have names, the research team gave names to their wild parents: from Van Gogh (due to his purple stripes) to Ursa Minor, Ophelia and Clooney.

“It may be shocking to hear this,” Hodin said. “They have personalities.”

Some stars are docile and allow themselves to be lifted up, while others resist stubbornly and cling to the surface above which their arms rest with their thousands of tiny suction cups.

“We had long struggles where I tried to lift Harriet up,” Hodin said.

As the younger stars grew larger and needed more space, some of the wild stars, including Harriet, were released back into the places where they had been captured several years earlier.

“Bye, and thanks for the larvae, but you can go home now,” said Hodin.