This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Nearly every morning when she was a doctoral student in the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS), Nicole Nakata, Ph.D. '23 (biology), would cross the street from the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology (OIMB) in Charleston, Ore., to the high-tide line of the Pacific Ocean. Her job was to catch microscopic brittle star plankton larvae from the incoming tidal current and bring them back to OIMB's labs to analyze under a microscope.
Unnoticed by most people, these "babies of the sea" are everywhere in the ocean. "These larvae are so beautiful and complex, but they are microscopic," Nakata said. "If you spend time in the ocean, it's probable you've swallowed many larvae." Nakata now works as a faculty member at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau, where she joined as a postdoctoral researcher and instructor in 2024.
After years of working together, Nakata and CAS marine biologist Richard Emlet, previously her doctoral adviser, have published research on newly discovered species of brittle star plankton and documented unstudied larval forms. In their studies, they have also found that Oregon's coastal ecosystems are connected to the broader West Coast region. Their discoveries were published in the June 2026 issue of Invertebrate Biology.
For years, Emlet and Nakata collaborated on this research, spending hours together at the microscope. For Nakata, it was an opportunity to learn from an expert; for Emlet, Nakata brought fresh momentum to complete a project that was years in the making. During their research, they discovered three new species of brittle star plankton off the Oregon coast and published detailed descriptions of about 10 larval species that had never been photographed or described.
"We'd go bananas whenever we found a new species," Emlet said. Documenting these microscopic organisms deepens the understanding of marine life along the Oregon coast and reveals how connected local brittle star plankton are to distant regions along the West Coast. Because immature larvae often look nothing like their adult forms, the researchers had an extra step as they documented their work.
They had to match the genetic signatures of larval samples with known adults, a step called DNA barcoding. The genetic detective work led to some surprises. They found larval versions of adult brittle stars whose mature populations were only known to live hundreds of miles away in British Columbia and the San Francisco Bay Area.
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