It’s not a fish, It’s a Sea Star
40th edition of Marine Life monthly post. Marine Life post published on the 19th of the month. It aims to share information about the marine life species and to promote their conservation. All images in this post are taken by Indah Susanti unless stated otherwise.
It appears starfish is not exactly what I had in mind. First of all, I thought a starfish was some kind of a fish species. I was wrong. A starfish is not a fish, and marine scientists have been using the name of sea star instead of starfish.
The sea star has eyes. They have one on the end of each of their arms. So, a five-armed sea star has five eyes and a 40 armed sea star has 40 eyes. However, their eyes do not see much details. In fact, they are color blinds.
I am sure we all are aware that a sea star can regenerate their lost limbs, just like Wade in Deadpool movie. But, wait, it’s not only that, even from their limbs, some of the sea star species can regenerate a new body and become a new sea star. I have seen sea star’s arm that separated from its body, and it looks like a worm. It was moving around. The following images are showing the separated arms of the sea star and they still looked alive! I am not sure how long does it take to re-grow the body… It’s impressive but also kind of freaky at the same time.
While the sea star has an amazing “superpower” to regenerate, the sea star has no brain nor blood. They do have mouths and eat with their stomach inside out. I know, it’s a bit hard to process how does it look like in reality.
Galapagos Diving
Marine life has fascinating abilities that open our eyes to a different world, a different perspective, different lives within this planet. Unfortunately, even the sea star (starfish) are in threatened status due to the increasing pollution in the coastal areas and ocean in general. Please keep our planet healthy and clean by taking care of our waste properly. It’s a little thing that we can do but it may help our counterparts who reside in the ocean to survive.
indahs: dive, travel & photography 