She spent her mornings catching invisible baby sea-stars — and found three new species

When Nicole Nakata was a doctoral student in Oregon, she started nearly every morning at the shoreline, scooping up drifting baby brittle stars — the star-shaped cousins of sea stars, so tiny you'd swallow some swimming and never know. With her mentor Richard Emlet at the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology, she spent years at the microscope: three species new to science, about ten larval forms never photographed or described. Some larvae even skip childhood — hatching and going straight to juvenile, like a caterpillar becoming a butterfly without the eating stage. DNA fingerprinting matched some of these babies to adults hundreds of miles away in British Columbia and San Francisco Bay, revealing just how connected the West Coast ocean really is.