Thank you for your interest in reading The Astorian. Here are a few stories that you might have missed this week:

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The baby sea star looked like a strange gray flower, tucked in the dark purple “y” of an adult sea star’s arms.

A crowd of people crouched in the sand near the rocks for a closer look. They were volunteers with a sea star monitoring project in Oswald West State Park on the North Coast. For the last hour, they had been hunting among three particular rocks, looking for sea stars.

The site is one of many that inform coastwide efforts to understand how and where the mysterious wasting disease that struck in 2013 and decimated sea star populations continues to impact the animals.

In recent years, citizen scientists and researchers have seen encouraging, if uneven, signs of recovery among ochre sea star populations along the Oregon Coast. The baby sea star at Oswald West is one such sign.

But a new study out of Oregon State University asks a critical question: How much can one community take? For organisms that live in Oregon’s dynamic rocky intertidal area, the answer might be: Only so much.

See the story by Katie Frankowicz, through our news partnership with KMUN, by clicking here.

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A growing number of criminal defendants in Clatsop County are working to get their records sealed.

The increase comes two years after a state law expanded access to expungements, a legal process to clear the official record of a conviction, dismissed charge or arrest.

In the past six months alone, 140 defendants in the county had their arrest and conviction records set aside. In all of 2021, by comparison, fewer than 50 cases were set aside.

Passed with strong bipartisan support by the Oregon Legislature, the law, which took effect in January 2022, eliminated filing fees and greatly reduced wait times in an effort to give defendants more opportunity to put their pasts behind them.

“It’s an important part of the system, to give people a chance to move on with their lives after they’ve made mistakes,” said Judge Kirk Wintermute, a Circuit Court judge in Clatsop County. “And, hopefully, they’ve done what they needed to do to reintegrate with society fully and move on.”

Read the story by Jasmine Lewin by clicking here.

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A wellness initiative aimed at improving health and increasing life spans could soon come to the North Coast.

The term “Blue Zones” was coined by researcher Dan Buettner in a book first published in 2008. He cataloged five areas of the world where populations live unexpectedly long lives: Ikaria, Greece; Sardinia, Italy; Okinawa, Japan; Nicoya, Costa Rica; and Loma Linda, California.

Since then, Buettner and Blue Zones — a company acquired by Adventist Health in 2020 — have sought to reverse engineer longevity across North America, implementing initiatives in places such as Fort Worth, Texas; Albert Lea, Minnesota; and Klamath Falls.

There are now 75 project communities — and Astoria could be next.

Mike Brosius, a retired Costco executive, and Constance Waisanen, a financial adviser, are behind the effort to bring the Blue Zones project to Astoria. The pair learned about Blue Zones independently — Brosius read one of Buettner’s books, and Waisanen, who serves on the board of Columbia Memorial Hospital in Astoria, heard about the initiative at health care conferences.

Several months ago, Brosius and Waisanen got together over lunch and started thinking about what it would take to turn Astoria into a Blue Zone.

Take a look at the report by Rebecca Norden-Bright by clicking here.

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— Derrick DePledge