All good things. . .

. . . must come to an end, so they say. And Scott’s and my little experiment growing Pisaster ochraceus came to its end when the last of our teensy stars gave up the ghost a week ago. We aren’t entirely surprised, as nobody before us had succeeded in growing these guys in the post-larval stage, but it’s still sad to see the empty paddle table and disappointing to know that we haven’t really added to the body of knowledge about how to grow them.

But we did make a small bit of progress, at least to further our own understanding of exactly how difficult it is to do what we attempted. To summarize, here’s a timeline of what we did and what happened:

• 18 and 20 May 2015 — Collected adult stars from local intertidal sites. Made up the solution of “magic juice” (100 µM 1-methyladenine).
• 2 June 2015 — Shot up stars with 1-MA. Got usable amounts of gametes from a total of three stars: 2 Purple (1 female + 1 male) and 1 Orange (female). After examining gametes to make sure they were okay, set up two matings: Purple x Purple; and Orange x Purple. The Purple x Purple embryos went through the earliest developmental stages just fine. The Orange x Purple embryos got off on the wrong foot and never recovered.
• 5 June 2015 — Purple x Purple embryos began undergoing gastrulation. Began feeding them. Orange x Purple embryos all dead.
• 20 July 2015 (age 48 days) — Larvae began settling.
• 27 July 2015 (age 55 days) — Counted a total of ~22 tiny stars in the jars. Removed a few to measure, and they were all 500 µm or smaller in diameter. It was very difficult keeping track of things this tiny in our 1-gallon jars.
• 13 August 2015 (age 73 days) — Paintbrushed out all of the little stars into a bowl and divvied them up into six food treatments. Replaced bowls in the paddle table to provide very gentle stirring.
• 21 August – 7 September 2015 — Stars died off in all but one of the food treatment bowls. By 7 September (age 96 days) the only surviving stars (N=4) were the ones we kept in a bowl with a small piece of mussel shell.
• 11 September 2015 (age 100 days) — And then there were three.
• 28 September 2015 (age 117 days) — Two survivors + 1 corpse.
• 2 October 2015 (age 121 days) — And then there were none.

In a nutshell, the larval development went fairly well, as we expected, and the post-larval survival sucked, also as we expected. We did manage to get those last two stars to survive 48 days post-metamorphosis, which is something. I’m not sure how much credit we can take for that, though, as I suspect that the reason the other juveniles died had to do with poor water quality as much as lack of food.

Here’s what I think might have been going on: We are in our second consecutive year of elevated seawater temperature, and coupled with the massive El Nino that yesterday was proclaimed to be among the strongest ever this means that coastal animals are being subject to higher-than-normal temperatures. In ectothermic poikilotherms such as marine invertebrates, metabolic rate is directly related to environmental temperature. Thus, higher ambient seawater temperature should result, all else being equal, in a faster growth rate.

This sounds like it might be a good thing for the Pisaster larvae, especially if predation and other risks are higher in the planktonic larval stages than as benthic juveniles. However, I think there’s more to the problem than simple growth rate. What if success as a juvenile depends not only on how quickly an animal progresses through all of its developmental stages, but also on how much time it spends in the different stages? For some larvae, notably the nauplius larva of barnacles, the primary job is to eat as much as possible and deposit energy reserves in the form of oil droplets; these food reserves will be utilized by the second larval stage, the non-feeding cyprid, as it hunts around for a place to establish a permanent home in the benthos. Perhaps part of the job of the developing Pisaster brachiolaria larvae is also to sequester energy reserves. Although no oil droplets were visible in any of the larvae that Scott and I observed this summer, energy could have been stored in other tissues of the larval body.

Back to the problem of post-larval survival. Our larvae began metamorphosing after only 48 days in the plankton. One of our sources has Pisaster ochraceus undergoing metamorphosis at 76-228 days in culture, at temperatures of about 12°C (for the duration of our experiment this summer ambient seawater temps were 15-18.5°C). So, if the warmer temperatures caused the larvae to develop more quickly than normal, and the larvae spent ~25 fewer days in the plankton than they “should” have, they may simply not have had time to accumulate whatever energy reserves they’d need to draw on once they metamorphosed.

That’s just a guess on my part. I also imagine that poor water quality played a part in our juvenile stars’ demise. It proved to be impossible to make potential food available to such tiny animals while keeping their water clean. We thought that stirring on the paddle table might help, and who knows, maybe it did.

In any case, RIP, little guys. Thanks for what you taught us, and I’m sorry we weren’t able to help you succeed.