Sunflower Sea Star

A large sea star once abundant across the northeastern Pacific Ocean from Alaska to southern California, especially in Puget Sound, British Columbia, northern California and southern Alaska. It has a soft, velvet-textured body with sixteen to twenty-four powerful, sucker-lined arms in adults, colored bright orange, yellow-red, brown or sometimes purple, and can span a meter across and weigh around five kilograms, making it the heaviest sea star known. It lives in low subtidal and intertidal areas down to 435 meters, on seaweed, kelp, sand, mud, shells, gravel or rocky bottoms, avoiding higher tidal zones where its heavy body would lack the support of water. The species has been classified Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List since 2020, after sea star wasting disease and warming ocean temperatures caused a severe population collapse beginning in 2013.