To save a huge, 24-armed sea creature, scientists become loving foster parents

Jason Hodin hauls up a rope that’s hanging from a dock in the waters off San Juan Island in the Pacific Northwest. At the end is a square, sandwich-size Tupperware container, with mesh-covered holes in the sides to let water flow through. Hodin pulls off the lid and peers inside at some crushed bits of shell. He points to some reddish-orange dots.

"See that? That little dot right there in front of my finger?" Hodin says. "That's a juvenile sea star that's about a month old."

It's only the size of a poppy seed. But when this baby is all grown up, it could be as big as a manhole cover. That's because this is Pycnopodia helianthoides, aka the sunflower sea star. It's one of the biggest sea stars in the world, with an arm span that can be more than 3 feet across, and it used to be a common sight in the waters off the West Coast.

Now, though, it's critically endangered and is being driven toward extinction by a mysterious, devastating disease.

This is why Hodin and his colleagues at the University of Washington's Friday Harbor Laboratories have spent the last two years figuring out how to raise this species in captivity. It's an act of desperation born out of the hope that someday, lab-grown sunflower sea stars could be reintroduced into places where this species has disappeared.