 This is Blair Bazderich with This Week in Science, coming to you with a twist short from the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium. I'm here with Julie Passarelli, a curator at the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium, and we're talking a little bit about the research that they do here. So can you give me a little bit of outline of the different types of research that you are in charge of? We have a field research program here at Cabrillo Marine Aquarium, and we have three pretty long-term surveys that we do. One of them is a rocky intertidal survey called Peninsula Shore Watch, and that one started in 1975 by our director emeritus, Dr. Suzanne Lawrence Miller, and her husband, Dr. Alan Miller, who's retired faculty from Cal State Long Beach. And we also have a survey that we started in 2006 called the Intercabrillo Beach Survey, and that one's a subtitle eelgrass survey, where we monitor the animals living just across the parking lot from our aquarium. What kind of changes have you seen over those several decades of research? Well, we have captured a lot of changes in 40 years along the Palos Verdes Peninsula. One of them is the absolute crash, the unfortunate crash of the black abalone. A black abalone is a little snail that gets to be about this big and lives in the upper intertidal of rocky shores along our coast. And our data basically has shown that they've gone functionally extinct and they are now listed on the endangered species. And the data basically captured the crash of the black abalone and the replacement of it by the purple sea urchin. What kind of effects have happened on the ecosystem as a whole when the abalone disappears and the urchins come in? Well, they both are herbivores, so they both feed on seaweed. But the purple urchin can move deeper into the subtitle, and they have a very wide range where they can live. And they have basically taken over the subtitle area along our coast and they can decimate kelp forests very quickly. And they just feed along the base and once they cut the bottom of the kelp, the kelp is now detached and drifts away and will die. And so sea urchins are responsible for the decline in kelp forests. Not the only reason, but one of the big reasons we've seen a decline in kelp forests in the last couple decades along Southern California. And so Long Beach is a huge port. So when you see all these boats coming in and out and we also obviously have concerns with ballast water and things like that, have you seen a big change in the different types of organisms we see off the coast here due to those kinds of activities? Have you guys seen a lot of that? We do have a couple of introduced species in this area. One of them is the yellowfin goby. That one's been here since the 70s. One wonders, is it competing or replacing native gobies? But there hasn't been too much done with that actually. This aquarium's research has done a lot figuring out about sea star wasting disease in the area. What have you guys seen changing? We're experiencing a sea star wasting syndrome up and down our coast from Canada all the way into Mexico. And it started a couple years ago. 2013 is when we really started to notice it down here. And the sea stars basically fall apart and die. And a paper recently came out basically finding that it's a virus. They identified it as a virus, a natural occurring virus that seems to be tied with elevated water temperature. And we've noticed in the last couple years in our Peninsula Shore Watch surveys that we're not finding any sea stars in our data set and we were before. None at all, no sea stars. No sea stars, yeah, yeah. But if we look back in our data, we've seen crashes before where sea star wasting syndrome has been reported in the past. And the sea stars do recover. So we are hoping that there are some resistant ones out there and the population will come back. And is there anything, is there a common thread between what happened last time and why we might be having the decline now of the sea stars? Is there something in common? It could be tied to the El Nino. Increased water temperature is a possibility and the virus thrives in that. And once it gets in the sea stars, it's waterborne. So once it's in that area, all the sea stars that aren't resistant to it are affected. And it also actually has been reported in other econoderms besides the ochre sea star. Other species are affected, bat stars and even some sea urchins. Wow, so all of the research that you guys are doing here has a lot of implications on future research to come and what we can do to help out these animals. Is there anything in particular you're looking forward to in relation to all your research? Yeah, I'm a parasitologist by training. I did a lot of my research in school on parasitology. So every time I'm doing these surveys with students and we're looking and counting different animals and identifying them, I'm always looking for parasites on them. And that's always very exciting to me. And one of our surveys that we do on the inner beach, we've actually found a couple new species of parasites. One of them is a leech. It's a marine leech that lives on the giant kelp fish. It's called Heptacyclus cabrioli. So I got to name it. So I named it after our aquarium. But I always make sure people don't worry it's not a leech that can go on a human. It has to live on a fish. And so you can still swim in the water with Heptacyclus cabrioli. That's so great. So I just want to encourage anyone who comes to Long Beach to check out the Cabrio Marine Aquarium. They're doing amazing things with research. They're partnering with universities. And it's an amazing educational facility. So I encourage all of you to come down. Thank you so much, Julie, for your time today. Thank you. Thanks for watching. Follow us on Twitter at Twist Science. You can also find us on iTunes by searching This Week in Science and the iTunes Directory. We have an Android app, Twist for Droid. Or go to our website, www.twist.org. You can also watch our past YouTube videos on twist.org slash YouTube.