PORT ANGELES — A tank of colorful anemones and sponges and another housing lion nudibranchs frame a large, nearly empty tank at the Feiro Marine Life Center.
The large octopus tank awaits a new resident: a young giant Pacific octopus to act as the marine center’s mascot and educational representative.
However, none has been forthcoming.
Staff members have been searching tidepools for young octopuses along the shorelines and have taken four trips to likely areas, said Bob Campbell, facilities director at Feiro — but no luck.
The young octopus he seeks would be “a small guy,” about 2 years old and similar in size to a baseball, Campbell said.
Both male and female giant Pacific octopuses, which reach about 16 feet across and weigh 110 pounds, live about three years, breed once, then die.
The marine center holds a license to keep a wild octopus and is required to return that octopus when it approaches breeding age and condition.
“My goal is to try to have it work out so that we have an octopus for about a year,” Campbell said.
Catching a young octopus is performed with a bucket, but it’s not simple to capture one and get it to adjust to life in a marine center tank, he said.
“It’s not like putting a sea star in a tank, where it will just stay there. It’s a timing thing,” he said.
The new octopus would replace Ursula, an octopus released Jan. 11 in Freshwater Bay, where Campbell caught her two years ago.
The past five octopuses — Octavia, Ariel, Opal, Obecka and Ursula — have all been female by happenstance, according to the staff.
Some sea creatures that make their home at Feiro have been accidentally caught by fishermen who haul their catches in and find unexpected extras.
A basket star was accidentally hauled in by a fisherman several years ago and taken to Feiro, and the curlicued creature thrived in a large tank — surprisingly long for a deep-water species, Campbell said.
Campbell said that while Feiro accepts animals that have been caught, people should not seek animals for the center.
Feiro has not sought new sea stars for its tanks. Currently, the tanks are populated with only a few of the large ochre stars — but plenty of smaller blood stars.
The marine center’s ochre and sunflower stars were hard-hit by sea star wasting syndrome, a disease believed to be caused by a densovirus that has killed a majority of sea stars on the West Coast.
Marine biologist Helle Anderson, with a team of volunteers, is conducting studies of wild sea star populations in Freshwater Bay, where the population has plunged by more than 95 percent and some species have disappeared.
The survey was scheduled to be held at low tide Wednesday evening.
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Reporter Arwyn Rice can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5070, or at arice@peninsuladailynews.com.
