Major support for Oregon Field Guide is provided by... [ music playing ] WOMAN: Come on!

There he is, there he is, there he is.

[ exclaims ] Come over here, buddy!

Good boy!

[ laughing ] WOMAN: Whoo, high five!

Yeah!

ED JAHN: Next on Oregon Field Guide: [ playing tune ] A spider web that plays music and helps scientists understand how spiders see their prey.

Then, a spot of winter joy in the small town of Sumpter, Oregon.

Ho-ho-ho-ho!

But first, massive sea stars have been plagued by a mysterious disease.

There may be a solution in sight.

You know those fun little starfish we love to see on the coast?

Well, think about the sunflower sea star as the mega version of that, with an arm span up to three feet in length.

Which makes it all the more disheartening to know that they've been devastated by a disease over the last several years.

But producer Noah Thomas and photographer Stephani Gordon joined researchers who may be on to a promising solution.

[ music playing ] THOMAS: If you were a scallop or mussel, this would be terrifying.

Meet pycnopodia helianthoides, the sunflower sea star.

It's the largest sea star on Earth, boasting an arm span of up to three feet and growing as many as 24 limbs.

Sunflower stars are a keystone species for ecosystems along the West Coast, which means they play a critical role in the surrounding habitats.

But there's a big problem: sunflower stars are at risk of becoming endangered, and their declining numbers has had a cascading effect on kelp forests.

MAN: It's important to think about these top predators as maintaining structure and health of a biodiverse ecosystem.

These are baby pycnopodia, and the fact that they even exist is a minor miracle.

Through trial and error, scientists had to basically figure out how to do IVF, or in vitro fertilization, for sea stars.

No small task, but Jason Hodin, who runs the world's first pycnopodia captive breeding program, is up for the challenge.

It's like the most enjoyable thing that I could possibly imagine, like being able to see these stars grow from embryos through these incredible larval stages and undergo this incredible metamorphosis.

I mean, this is an amazing thing to be able to witness.

For the past three years, they've been meticulously caring for this first generation born in the lab from wild-caught parents.

And today's the first attempt to see if these lab-born stars can successfully breed... [ bell dings, crowd applauding, cheering ] ...something that before now has never been attempted.

We are about to select six stars that were born in 2019 and that are now a little bit over three years old, and we're going to attempt to spawn them for the first time.

We think they might be reproductive this year.

All right, let's bring 'em in.

Bucket of stars.

-WOMAN: Bucket of stars.

-[ all cheer ] Oh, my God, you weren't kidding.

Okay, these guys are just under 1,000 milliliters.

Come here.

-There we go.

-I really-- Ooh, okay.

Don't do that.

[ laughs nervously ] HODIN: The way to spawn a sea star is to inject it with its native spawning hormone, 1-methyladenine, and so we made up a solution yesterday of that.

WOMAN: Sea stars, from the outside, I couldn't look at one in the wild and say, "This is a male, this is a female."

They look exactly the same.

So, you have to rely on when they spawn, because that's going to be pretty obvious.

HODIN: All right, I would go central on the central disc.

And don't inject yourself.

Okay, that's good.

And that's injecting in arm four.

WOMAN: There you go, buddy.

In just a few hours, if the sea stars are ready, the hormone will trigger the release of eggs or sperm.

The males will hopefully start to spawn in about an hour and a half.

Then a bit later, the female spawns.

At one point, hundreds of millions of sunflower stars flourished throughout the West Coast.

But in 2013, a mysterious disease known as wasting syndrome led to mass die-offs, killing over 90 percent of the sunflower stars in North America.

WOMAN: They'll just start, without prompting, losing arms.

And this can happen to one arm to many, the majority of the star even.

HODIN: We lost somewhere around 90 percent of the sunflower stars, which is hundreds of millions of animals.

As horrible as that is, what that suggests is that the ones that didn't die probably had a little bit of resistance to it.

And if two of those stars breed, like the two stars that we breed in our captive-breeding program, we think that their offspring are likely to be even more fit in response to the disease, too.

The goal of the captive breeding program is to raise stars that are more resistant to wasting.

These stars will eventually be released into the wild and begin a gradual process of rebuilding their population.

But before all that can happen, Jason needs sperm and eggs.

Well, I mean, there was just the ever-tiniest little bit of sperm.

I'm sure he's going to spawn a little more, but do you see the cloudiness in that?

We'd like to keep track of who spawns.

And by separating the males and females, then we can control the fertilization.

Okay, I'm just going to pick him up real quick.

Trying not to get it spilled in the female tank there.

But I also want to take a quick look at this.

[ crank squeaking ] You can see that it's getting concentrated down there at the bottom.

And I'm just pulling it off up to the part that it's concentrated.

Oh, yeah, lots of swimming sperm.

That's a good sign.

Looks like this is a boy, too.

[ singsong ] Ariadne's a boy.

HODIN: We are so far getting only males.

CURLISS: You kind of need two to tango.

HODIN: Yeah, you need two to tango, and the backup plan is going to be that tomorrow, I might take one of the adult females and spawn her so that we can get some eggs.

But it's exciting right now.

I mean, they're clearly reproductive.

They're spawning on cue, and it's great.

There's another crucial step in the effort to restore sunflower star populations, and it's happening at the Oregon Coast Aquarium.

We have our oldest and biggest pycnopodia right here.

If I just very gently touch her, she's going to reach up and touch me back, and this responsiveness is something that we like to see, because it indicates that they're doing well.

This is aquarist Tiffany Rudek, and she's come up with a clever way to treat wasting disease.

This is one of our sea star treatment patients.

He dropped all of his arms and is now growing them back.

The treatment starts with giving the stars an iodine bath to kill harmful bacteria, fungus, and parasites on their skin.

Then they're put in a water solution that contains nutrients and a special probiotic to help the stars heal and regenerate lost limbs.

Last, the water temperature is lowered to 50 degrees, which is ideal for sea stars but too cold for harmful bacteria to spread.

That's kind of the really huge benefit of this treatment, is they're able to just use their immune system fully for healing and regeneration and to get strong again.

It gives them a unique chance at recovery.

Back at Friday Harbor, the lab-raised females still haven't spawned and may need more time to mature.

So, Jason's moved to plan B. HODIN: So, this is Prospero.

Prospero is a female, has spawned a couple times for us in the past.

If she spawns, then we can at least get offspring that are half from the wild and half from our brood stock, which would be the first time that's ever happened, too, so that's still worthwhile.

CURLISS: I just looked a minute ago.

-That's so awesome.

-Okay.

It's sort of building up there.

Prospero is spawning.

Now we have some eggs that we can use with the sperm that we got from yesterday.

We're about to fertilize.

-Okay.

-Ready?

Yep.

Sixteen, 17, 18, 19, 20.

I think that'll be enough.

We can always add more later.

Can't take sperm away, but can add more.

CURLISS: That's what I always say.

[ both laughing ] HODIN: I'm seeing fertilization.

Exciting!

At least now, we've got the capacity for the first time to close the loop on the life cycle.

In other words, to raise a batch of larvae where at least one of the parents was born in captivity themselves.

So, it's pretty exciting.

For the scientists, this is a true milestone.

But before they can start releasing stars along the West Coast, one final consideration remains: figuring out whether or not these lab-raised stars can survive in the wild ocean.

-I have 29.

-MAN: Sweet.

-Okay, you guys ready?

-Let's do it.

This is Joey Ullmann.

He's the dive lead for the sunflower star breeding program.

Joey's job is to transition the lab-grown stars into the ocean to see whether they can survive on their own.

By keeping them in cages, he's able to closely track their progress over time.

ULLMANN: So, this is ensuring that our captive-reared stars don't immediately succumb to wasting.

[ music playing ] HODIN: We do have our eyes on this idea of a release into the wild, and we want to make sure that the stars that we release out there are fit and that they're going to survive in that context.

So, why go through all this trouble to begin with?

Why is it so important that sunflower stars survive?

CURLISS: When you lose pycnopodia from the environment, you are losing the predator that keeps the population in check.

Urchin populations have exploded, and they have just been decimating kelp forests.

HODIN: The kelp forest ecosystem in the West Coast, it's really worthwhile to think of it as a forest.

It's literally like a tropical rainforest of the ocean.

Kelp forests are rather important because they create a lot of oxygen and they suck up a lot of CO2.

The hope is that maybe the reintroduction of pycnopodia will help take down the urchin population and help flip that back over to a kelp forest environment.

A species shouldn't have to justify to you why they need to exist.

We've altered the planet in a lot of ways that have made it rather inhospitable for many species and we've lost a lot of them, and I think whether or not something is relevant to medical research or to, like, the greater environmental impact, all species deserve to have that fighting chance to continue existing.

[ music playing ] [ birds chirping ] This next story weaves together the work of spiders, engineers, and musicians.

Any more would give away the surprise, but I think you'll agree that producer Jule Gilfillan has definitely spun one of Oregon Field Guide's more unconventional stories.

GILFILLAN: Nature's webs come in all shapes and sizes, from dense shrouds to silken curtains, from creative chaos to perfect symmetry.

They can look like waves and nets... slings and deadly funnels.

Of course, these intricate creations are useful for catching prey, but that's not their only purpose.

MAN: Spiders that weave webs often have very poor eyesight, and so they understand the world through the vibrations in their webs.

So, I've always been fascinated by spiders, and I was looking at how does the whole web vibration communicate information to the spider?

While this might sound like an inquiry into biology and nature, for Ross Hatton of Oregon State University, it starts with robots.

I study snakes and spiders and how they move and how we can use those ideas from how they move to make better robots.

So, how do you get from web-weaving spiders to engineering robots?

We started off by building computer models of how vibrations travel through complex networks of strings.

And in order to validate those models, we built the spider web.

The web needed to translate how a spider senses the world into a form humans can understand.

And our closest understanding of vibrations as humans is sound, and so how can we translate the vibrations that are happening in the web into sound?

This process is known as bioinspiration.

Bioinspiration is looking at animals and saying, "What are the things that an animal does that we might want to use as a starting point for engineering?"

For example, real spiders use very stiff, strong silk for their webs' radial lines and stretchier silk for the spiral lines.

To duplicate this 10:1 ratio, the team used parachute cord for the radial lines and shock cord for the spiral lines, the stuff hair elastics are made of.

One of the next decisions was how large the web should be.

The clear answer for that was eight feet, but that was a little bit too big to build, and so we cut that in half to about a four-foot diameter.

Adjustable tuning pegs pull all the web's strings into a uniform tension.

Then, along came a spider.

A live spider can feel vibrations through its legs, and so when the web shakes, that shakes the foot.

And so it's almost like we have an ear listening to each of these radial strands.

The team began exploring cues like direction, loudness, and pitch to get a sense of how spiders collect information.

For direction, the model suggested spiders might do it pretty much like we do.

If you hear a sound and you look at it, you're balancing the sound between your ears.

We can use that to center where the source is coming from.

Ross' spider looks for that balance between its feet.

[ fly buzzing ] With eight feet, you can figure out which pairs of feet are centered on the sound.

Once we've done that, we can combine that with the loudness to determine is it coming from in front of you or behind you?

That gives us direction information.

But to find out exactly where the prey is, simulated here by a pluck, the spider shows that it has a musical side.

We have made it so that the big, long strings play low notes and the short, little strings play high notes.

From that, we can tell, did they pluck it far away or did they pluck it close to the spider?

[ musical notes playing ] The model may seem whimsical, but the complex mathematics behind it prove another instance where engineering and biology make good partners.

[ people chattering indistinctly ] MAN: I have never seen anything like that.

No, this is the only one in the world.

-WOMAN: Oh, it is?

-HATTON: Yeah.

MAN: Oh, my gosh.

WOMAN: Is somebody going to play it pretty soon?

HATTON: Uh, yes.

From very early on in the project, I knew that we were going to build a physical spider web, and I said, "You know, when we string this up, it's going to look a lot like a harp."

But I didn't have someone who could take on the musical aspects of the project.

Enter Chet Udell, another OSU engineer with an extensive background in music.

My PhD is in music composition and electrical engineering.

I saw a news broadcast of this really cool four-foot spider web...

Perfect!

...and I was like, "This would be a really cool musical instrument."

Chet and Ross ran into each other at a university event and... Ross was like, "Yeah, I think it would be a really cool harp.

Let's do it."

HATTON: Welcome and thank you all for coming to the spider harp concert.

I'm Ross Hatton and this is Chet Udell.

[ crowd applauding ] UDELL: I am simultaneously the best spider-harp player in the entire world and I'm also the world's worst spider-harp player.

So, thanks for coming out to see it.

[ playing tune ] Every instrument has a trade-off.

In order to do a few things really well, it can't do other things really well.

Where the spider harp has a lot of advantages is that circular pitch layout.

There we go.

If you have a melody for, like, "the itsy-bitsy spider..." [ humming tune ] So there's like a shape to that melody.

And you could play that same melody up a very high octave or a very low octave, but it's still the same shape.

But it is a bit limited.

You know, when I first walked up to the spider harp, I could pluck a spot on the web and the spider could tell about once every five seconds where that vibration was coming from.

And I was like, "It's not fast enough.

It's not accurate enough.

Let's fix this thing and really buckle down."

And we spent a whole year collaborating, and we actually ended up optimizing the algorithm to detect five events per second.

[ playing Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt" ] It's an improvement, but you've still got to play kind of slow.

Still, this novel harp is not only unwrapping the secrets of a spider's senses, it also made it to the finals of the Guthman Musical Instrument Competition at Georgia Tech in 2019.

So, you put the cool back in spiders basically, is what you're telling us.

Okay, awesome.

[ playing Debussy's "Clair de lune" ] UDELL: I feel like this medium is ripe with opportunities, and the music that you hear really is only the very tip of that experiential iceberg.

This really frivolous desire to transform this physical model of how spiders detect vibrations in their web into an instrument that you could play onstage, you know, I think that this collaboration between the arts and the sciences can improve engineering.

That's a very exciting thing for me.

It's also a good example of how an intriguing scientific inquiry can lead to a pretty cool way to spend a summer afternoon.

[ music playing ] Merry Christmas!

Hi, guys.

This next one is just for fun, because who doesn't love a good small-town parade?

And that's what Jule Gilfillan and Todd Sonflieth found in the mountain town of Sumpter in the middle of winter.

-MAN: Who's that?

-CHILDREN: Santa!

Merry Christmas!

Ho-ho-ho-ho!

RIDERS: ♪ Oh, jingle bells Jingle bells ♪ ♪ Jingle all the way ♪ ♪ Oh, what fun it is... ♪ [ bell ringing and train horn blowing ] MAN: So, the Sumpter Valley Railroad is an all-volunteer organization.

Our Christmas train and the city of Sumpter's Christmas celebration is the second weekend in December every year.

Are you going to go to the parade?

-Yeah.

-No.

-CHILDREN: Yeah.

-Yes, you are!

DOWNING: On Saturday evening, after our last run, the city of Sumpter has their Christmas parade and their tree lighting.

About ready to go.

CROWD: One, two, three... [ all cheering ] DOWNING: And the community members put out burn barrels for people to stay warm and roast chestnuts.

-WOMAN: Put your hats on.

-MAN: There you go.

-Merry Christmas!

-Merry Christmas.

WOMAN: I almost get emotional with the parade.

To see so many people come together in this weather, and everybody has their four-wheelers or their costumes or whatever.

I'm one of the three wise men.

-I'm Mary.

-I'm Joseph.

And I'm baby Jesus.

SVATY: And then Santa, I mean, it's nice.

It's a family up here.

WOMAN: Show us your wings, angel!

-[ woman laughs ] -MAN: Nice!

-SANTA: Ho-ho-ho-ho!

-[ horn honking ] DOWNING: After the parade is over, there's a candy dump.

SVATY: The huge dump truck, it's everybody's big Tonka here.

Everybody wants the big dump truck, the biggest Tonka truck you'll ever see.

And he dumps an abundance of candy.

[ children clamoring ] [ horn honks ] So, it's an awesome community.

And I think it gets you in the spirit, it softens your heart, and everybody's happy.

And while the world is a little crazy right now, -it's just a happy spot.

-[ train bell ringing ] MAN 1: Merry Christmas!

MAN 2: Yeah, merry Christmas to you, too.

[ woman laughing ] [ music playing ] You can now find many Oregon Field Guide stories and episodes online.

And to be part of the conversation about the outdoors and environment here in the Northwest, join us on Facebook.

[ water bubbling ] [ playing tune ] Major support for Oregon Field Guide is provided by... Additional support provided by... And the following... and contributing members of OPB and viewers like you.