California's vanished sunflower sea stars are not totally vanished

California's sunflower sea stars were nearly erased by wasting disease and warming water. Recently, scientists found 18 of them off the Sonoma County coast.

SFGATE reports that divers near Sea Ranch found the largest known group of wild sunflower sea stars seen in California waters since a mass die-off began in 2013. The many-armed predators once helped keep purple urchins in check, which matters because urchins have been mowing through already-stressed kelp forests. Eighteen survivors do not mean recovery is solved, but they do mean California's missing monster sea star is not quite gone.

"What was so exciting about the Sonoma County site was there were larger, not just little, individuals at a density that could be meaningful for reproduction," Lauren Schiebelhut, an affiliate with University of California, Merced, who is analyzing genetic samples from the 18 stars, told SFGATE. "If you just have an isolated star, then it's not doing much for the population." 

Schiebelhut hopes to have some findings by the end of this summer that build upon a breakthrough study published last year, which revealed that a bacteria called Vibrio pectenicida had caused the sea star to waste away.

"Ultimately, we're interested in how these new stars fit into the conservation landscape," Schiebelhut said. "So where are they coming from? What do they look like? What do the pathogen dynamics look like?"SF Gate

Twenty-four arms is a lot of comeback.

Previously:
• Ivory-billed woodpecker, thought to be extinct, turns up in Louisiana
• Scientists cry foul on Colossal's 'de-extincted Dire Wolf' claim
• The slender-billed curlew is extinct