STAC grant helps team study deaths of sea stars

BRIGHT STARS: With the help of a $40,000 Collaborative Research Grant from the R.I. Science and Technology Advisory Council, URI student Caitlin Del Sesto is part of a team hoping to find out why sea stars have been dying. / PBN PHOTO/TRACY JENKINS
BRIGHT STARS: With the help of a $40,000 Collaborative Research Grant from the R.I. Science and Technology Advisory Council, URI student Caitlin Del Sesto is part of a team hoping to find out why sea stars have been dying. / PBN PHOTO/TRACY JENKINS

The last thing a marine researcher wants is for all her sea stars to die in their tank. Yet that is exactly what happened to University of Rhode Island student Caitlin Del Sesto last May when she was working on a research project for her invertebrate zoology class.
“It was pretty terrifying, to be honest,” Del Sesto said, but her professor was understanding. “He knew there would be some bigger implications of it.”
Sure enough, when Del Sesto asked around, she learned the same thing had happened to other researchers. She saw the problem again when she worked over the summer at the New England Aquarium, and again in the fall at the Mystic Aquarium. It all led to a clear conclusion: some mysterious disease was killing sea stars up and down the East Coast.
Now, with the help of a $40,000 Collaborative Research Grant from the R.I. Science and Technology Advisory Council, Del Sesto is part of a team hoping to find out just what is wrong with the starfish. Theirs is one of six projects funded by this year’s round of grants, totaling $810,541.
The 2013 STAC grant recipients are all projects focused on understanding how climate change affects Rhode Island’s marine life and ecosystems. The goal is to ensure Rhode Island is a global leader in the field and to attract further research funding to the state.
This year’s grants mark the seventh round of awards as part of STAC’s partnership with the National Science Foundation’s Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research, or EPSCoR. To date, STAC has awarded $8.5 million in grants that have brought in $36 million in follow-on grant funding, federal programs, commercialization of new products, venture funding for new companies and infrastructure improvements, according to the council.
In addition to attracting funding, the grants are aimed at encouraging collaboration among Rhode Island’s universities and other research institutions. Projects need to have lead researchers from at least two institutions to be eligible for a grant.
Collaboration is key because it draws on the different strengths of Rhode Island’s researchers and institutions, said STAC Executive Director Christine Smith. “So many issues are multidisciplinary,” Smith explained. “You won’t find answers to challenging questions unless you’re at an intersection of multiple disciplines.”
To solve the dying sea star mystery, Del Sesto and Gary Wessel of Brown University called on the expertise of four other professors from three Rhode Island universities.
Wessel, who has worked with sea stars for many years, was one of the researchers Del Sesto contacted when she first encountered the problem. He called her in turn when he was working on the grant proposal, and they assembled a team that covered the different areas their research demands.
Roxanna Smolowitz, from Roger Williams University, is an expert in aquatic diseases.
The remaining researchers are from URI. Edward Baker manages the seawater facilities at the school’s Narragansett Bay campus and can help replicate the sea stars’ habitat. Marta Gomez-Chiarri is a professor of aquatic pathology. Niels-Viggo Hobbs is a marine biologist who has worked extensively in local waters. Hobbs was also Del Sesto’s professor when she first encountered the sea star disease.
Together, they hope to identify the cause of all the sea-star deaths so that, eventually, it can be isolated and managed.
Someday, Gomez-Chiarri said, the team’s research could lead to a diagnostic tool for the mysterious disease, which could then become a commercial product. But that kind of success is a long way off. The team has to work on the basics first.
The researchers had collected about 50 sea stars as of Aug. 1, just enough to get started on preliminary work. As word of their project has spread, they have begun receiving reports when people spot sea stars in local waters, which they hope will help them collect enough to continue.
With the existing group of sea stars, the team is trying to replicate the disease by exposing the specimens to different environmental conditions, such as varying temperatures and levels of salt. Once the sea stars show signs of disease, the researchers will know what conditions it occurs under and can start figuring out what exactly is killing the creatures.
That second stage of the research could take years, according to Gomez-Chiarri. She said the team hopes to make enough progress with the one-year STAC grant to apply for more funding down the road. Future funding is also a key aim for other STAC-funded projects, which researchers say are just a start on some key challenges facing marine life going forward, particularly the effects of climate variability.
Teams of researchers are studying how to track invasive algae species, how temperature changes affect flounder and blue crabs, how bacteria might be able to detoxify sediment and how vulnerable marine food webs are to changing ocean acidity.
Another project looks directly at climate change by studying how certain Narragansett Bay shrimp respond to warming water.
Jason Kolbe and Carol Thornber of URI and Jason Grear of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, along with a team of student researchers, have two groups of shrimp in their lab: one population in water at the highest temperature currently found in the bay and another in water at the projected temperature 100 years from now.
The shrimp make for ideal research subjects, Kolbe said, because they breed about every three weeks, so the team can watch whether and how the species evolves to adapt to the higher temperature. They also have a number of key traits, including size and swimming speed, that the team can easily measure.
To measure the shrimps’ speed, the student research assistants use high-speed video and what Kolbe calls “cool analysis software.” They tape the shrimp swimming, then break the video down frame by frame to measure how far the shrimp can go in one frame.
But the shrimp are not just convenient specimens. They are also “a good model, an important part of the food chain,” according to Kolbe.
If this shrimp species proves vulnerable to rising temperatures, “it might be a species that doesn’t exist in the system anymore in the future,” Kolbe said.
The potential implications for fish mean the research could also get an important economic question, he said: “How secure are our fisheries in Rhode Island?”
Studying shrimp could be key, said Kolbe, to understanding that question and projecting an answer for the future. •

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