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Oregon Institute of Marine Biology team finds three new brittle star species in coastal plankton
Biologists Nicole Nakata and Richard Emlet report three new brittle star species and about 10 never-described larval forms from the Oregon coast. Their catalogue adds to a baseline for when and how these animals reproduce off Oregon.
The Scientist · Science desk
What happened
- DNA matching tied some Oregon larvae to brittle stars whose adults are known only from British Columbia and the San Francisco Bay Area, hundreds of miles away.
- In several species the mothers make eggs big enough to nourish larvae through early development, so the young appear to skip feeding and go straight to the juvenile stage.
- The brittle star species in the study spawn during the winter months, according to the account of the work.
- The findings appear in the June 2026 issue of the journal Invertebrate Biology.
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Why it matters
- capability Barcode-matched descriptions of previously undocumented larvae give later plankton surveys a reference for identifying brittle star young that look nothing like their parents.
- constraint The coastwide link rests on where larvae turned up, so any management plan that assumes larvae move between regions would first need evidence of how far they actually travel.
- decision A reproductive baseline for these brittle stars has to be built from winter plankton samples, because winter is when the species spawn.
Nakata did the fieldwork as a doctoral student. She finished her Ph.D. in 2023 and now works at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau. Emlet, her former adviser, is still at the institute [14]. Nearly every morning she walked from the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology in Charleston, Ore., to the high-tide line across the street. There she caught brittle star larvae from the incoming tidal current and carried them back to the lab microscopes [3].
Identification was the slow part. Immature brittle stars often look nothing like the adults, so the pair matched the genetic signatures of larval samples to known adults, a step called DNA barcoding [4]. "These larvae are so beautiful and complex, but they are microscopic," Nakata said [15].
Barcoding also limits what the most interesting result can show. A barcode identifies the species a larva belongs to, but not where its parents live. The larvae matched to adults known only from British Columbia and the San Francisco Bay Area [5] could have drifted in from those populations. They could also come from adults living off Oregon that no survey has yet recorded. Telling those apart would take a search for adults off Oregon, or some measure of how far the larvae travel. I think the larvae establish presence and leave the route open. The account treats the matches as evidence that Oregon's coastal ecosystems are connected to the broader West Coast region [6].
"We'd go bananas whenever we found a new species," Emlet said [11]. The account does not give sample counts or collection years, and it does not say whether the three species are new to science or newly recorded off Oregon [1].
The account calls the development finding an even bigger surprise than the new species. Its wording is careful: some larvae "appeared to skip developmental stages entirely" [7]. The inference rests on egg size, with mothers supplying enough yolk that the young never need to eat before becoming juveniles [7]. "This happens often among marine animals, and we found a gold mine of examples," Emlet said. "We had no idea it was happening here in Oregon." [8]
Among the animals covered is the basket star Gorgonocephalus eucnemis, a brittle star with a central disk shaped like a hockey puck and five branched arms lined with tiny hooks and spines. Brittle stars, or ophiuroids, date to 500 million years ago [10].
The management argument comes from the account itself. It says the winter spawning informs local conservation efforts and contributes to a baseline for Pacific ecosystems [9]. It adds that studying how these animals reproduce lets researchers see how human activity affects their habitats [12]. Nakata said: "If we don't know how something makes babies, we can't do anything about it." [13]
What to watch
- Surveys for adult populations off Oregon of the brittle stars so far known as adults only from British Columbia and the San Francisco Bay Area.
- Whether the three species are formally named as new to science in the Invertebrate Biology papers or in later work.
- Larval tracking or current modelling that tests how far these brittle star larvae travel along the West Coast.