Hodin is fascinated by creatures who change form—“I’m even wearing my shirt,” he says, pointing to his T-shirt depicting a folk music festival celebrating metamorphosis. So when The Nature Conservancy asked him to try breeding sunflower stars, Hodin was excited. Sunflower stars go through a series of developmental stages—from eggs to poppy seed-sized larvae that float around for months to juvenile stars that settle on the sea floor and add more arms as they grow. And while plenty of sunflower stars have lived in aquariums, no one before Hodin had figured out how to consistently grow one from egg to adult. “Less than a handful of [species of] sea stars have ever been raised this way,” he says. The task was not without complications. When most people think about metamorphosis, their minds go to caterpillars turning into butterflies, or tadpoles to frogs, he says. “You can see that process with the naked eye.” But the only way to watch what happens with sunflower stars is through a microscope. “We literally knew nothing about those early stages: where they live, what they eat, what they need to grow.” Hodin’s success came through trial and error. He learned, for example, that when they’re young and sharing a tank, stars eat one another. “When they’re at this size and younger, especially younger, they’re cannibalistic,” he says, grinning. “I kind of describe it like the way my brother and I were—well mostly it was his fault.” After a while, the creatures seem to start liking each other so much that they wind up draped all over one another. Hodin also figured out that juveniles need to start hunting almost immediately. So he started raising juvenile urchins for his juvenile stars to chase and eat. He also gleaned valuable information about how sea stars feed throughout their life cycles. Adult sea stars can eat an urchin every day, but when they’re babies they may eat 10 baby urchins in the same span. That suggests it may take far fewer stars than once thought to restore balance to underwater ecosystems. Inside the lab, he shows me photos of stars he’s released into nearby eelgrass beds. He and his collaborators have been tracking them to see how they survive and grow. He found that although they disperse, they usually come back to the same piling where they were set free. Hodin assumes they possess some type of imprinting ability. “They presumably have some kind of map in their head about the environment around them,” he tells me.