Marine biologists discover new brittle star species off Oregon coast

Every morning for years, Nicole Nakata would walk across the street from the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology in Charleston and wade to the tide line of the Pacific. Her task was simple in description but demanding in execution: collect the microscopic larvae of brittle stars as they drifted in with the current, carry them back to the lab, and spend hours examining them under a microscope. Most people never notice these creatures. They are everywhere in the ocean—so small that anyone who has spent time in the water has almost certainly swallowed some without knowing it. But to Nakata, they were intricate and beautiful, each one a puzzle waiting to be solved.

Nakata completed her doctorate in biology in 2023 and has since moved to the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau, where she works as a postdoctoral researcher and instructor. But the work she began in Oregon continues to yield discoveries. Working alongside Richard Emlet, her former doctoral adviser and a marine biologist at the Oregon Institute, Nakata spent years at the microscope documenting what they found in those daily samples. The results of their collaboration appeared in the June 2026 issue of Invertebrate Biology: descriptions of three newly identified brittle star species and detailed documentation of approximately ten larval forms that had never been photographed or formally described before.

The work required more than careful observation. Because larval brittle stars look almost nothing like their adult forms, Nakata and Emlet had to use DNA barcoding—matching the genetic signatures of larvae to known adult specimens—to confirm what they were seeing. This genetic detective work produced an unexpected finding: some of the larvae they collected in Oregon belonged to species whose adult populations live hundreds of miles away, in British Columbia and the San Francisco Bay Area. The discovery revealed that Oregon's coastal waters are far more connected to the broader West Coast ecosystem than previously understood. Winter spawning seasons, the researchers found, send larvae drifting across vast distances, linking distant marine communities.

As they continued their analysis, Nakata and Emlet encountered something even more surprising. Several brittle star species appeared to skip entire developmental stages. In most animals, development follows a predictable sequence—a caterpillar eats voraciously before transforming into a butterfly. But in some of the brittle stars they studied, the mothers produce eggs large enough to nourish developing larvae without requiring them to feed as plankton. The larvae progress directly to the juvenile stage, bypassing the feeding phase entirely. Emlet described it as finding a gold mine of examples of this phenomenon, one that had gone undetected in Oregon waters until now.

The implications of this work extend beyond taxonomy and developmental biology. Understanding how marine animals reproduce is foundational to conservation. If researchers do not know how a species produces offspring, Nakata noted, there is little they can do to protect it. The baseline data they have established—which species are present, when they spawn, how their larvae develop—becomes essential as the ocean changes. Emlet is now planning the next phase of research, examining how plankton larvae behave during El Niño winters, when Pacific sea surface temperatures rise above normal. During their long-term sampling, he and Nakata noticed that certain larval species appeared only in samples collected during past El Niño events. With another El Niño winter expected in North America, Emlet wants to determine whether those migration patterns repeat. The question matters because it could reveal how species ranges shift as climate change warms the oceans. The daily sampling that made these discoveries possible—the commitment to being on the coast every single day, collecting larvae from the tide line—would have been impossible from a distance. It required presence, attention, and the kind of sustained observation that only proximity allows.