Starfish

“ A starfish can crawl in any direction by means of its sucking-feet, whether the surface be hard or rough Or polished, or the softest silt, whilst its supple body can squeeze through incredibly narrow crevices. ”

“ The two former, which may often be found hiding under the rocks, or in the seaweed, or in pools at low tide, resemble the ordinary starfish in having five distinct arms. These, however, as shown in fig. 3, are long and serpent-like, and are attached to a relatively small body or disk. The digestive and generative systems do not extend to the rays but are confined to the body. The arms are cylindrical and have no groove on the under side such as exists in starfish ”

“ And the starfish walks by pushing one or two of its rays forward, taking hold of the ground with the suckers underneath them, and then pulling up the hinder rays and taking hold with the suckers underneath those, and so on over and over again. ”

“ These beautiful sea animals present the appearance of delicately tinted flowers adorned with the most exquisite gems.
Starfish and sea-urchins of all descriptions are found in immense numbers. The five-rayed varieties of starfish are universally condemned as insatiable foes of the oyster family, and the oyster cultivators destroy all they can find. To dismember the body of the starfish by pulling off the finger-like rays does not kill the animal, for not only does each fish produce new rays but each ray will produce a new starfish. ”

“ Each day and almost each hour adds to the complexity of the little animal, lung tentacles grow out and many other larval stages are passed through before the starfish shape is discernible within this curious “nurse” or living, changing egg. Then the entire mass, so elaborately evolved through so long a time, is absorbed and the little baby star sinks to the bottom to start on its new life, crawling around and over whatever happens in its path and feeding to repletion on succulent oysters. ”

“ As soon as the starfish has a grip upon its victim the mouth opens and there is gradually pushed out a strong membrane which is the creature's great loose stomach. This envelops the animal, shell and all, or as much of it as possible, and soon begins actually to digest the flesh. When the meal is finished the starfish draws back its stomach and leaves only the empty shell of its prey. ”

“ The starfish has nerves, as we have already learned. These animals are called starfish because a great many of them are shaped like five-pointed stars. The body is in the center, and the rays correspond to our legs and arms. The nerves run along each ray. At the tip of each ray is a little dim eye, and a filmy covering that takes the place of an eyelid. Each ray is really a branch of the stomach. Little canals run from the stomach, which is in the center of the starfish's body, out to the end of each ray. ”

“ Starfishes are among the oddest of sea-animals; for one reason, because they have so many legs. Perhaps you did not know they had any legs at all; certainly you can see none when you pick up a dead specimen on the beach. The fact is that a starfish keeps its legs inside its body, where there are a lot of organs protected by its hard, limy hide ”

“ First the starfish would ask the snail something; and whatever answer the snail gave, the starfish would tell it to the sea-urchin, the urchin would tell it to the porpoises and the porpoises would tell it to the Doctor. ”

“ There were starfish with waving tentacles, sand-dollars, and the empty shells of sea-urchins and razor-clams. The black and ominous-looking objects which I implicitly believed to be sharks' eggs were often found near the borders of that ocean pond, and horseshoe crabs crawled darkly beneath its surface or lay dry and deceased on the sand. ”

“ We have seen a British starfish with its fully-formed young ones creeping about on its body, though the usual mode of development for shore starfishes is that the young ones pass through a free-swimming larval period in the open water. The father sea-spider carries about the eggs attached to two of his limbs; the father sea-horse puts his mate's eggs into his breast pocket and carries them there in safety until they are hatched; the father stickleback of the shore-pools makes a seaweed nest and guards the eggs which his wives are induced to lay there ”

“ Those who take an interest in the cultivation of the oyster find them far too familiar—for the starfish is the oyster's deadliest foe, not even excepting man.
The common Starfish, Asterias rubens, may constantly be found among stones, about low-tide mark. Its manner of walking is peculiar and characteristic. On the under surface of each ray are rows of white sucker-like tube-feet, which can either be drawn in or pushed out. By doing each alternately the animal walks. First the feet are extended to their full length; then the terminal [128] sucking disc of each catches hold of the ground. ”

“ At a later stage tangles of hemp or cotton waste may, be dragged over the oyster-beds, when the starfish will cling to them by their pedicellariae. They make excellent manure, but are of ho further service to man. Fishermen who catch them in their nets or on their lines often tear them in half and throw them back into the sea. Some of these mutilated animals may, however, grow fresh rays, and thus one may find a starfish consisting of one large ray and four quite small ones, the whole shaped like a comet. ”

“ The starfish climbs up on the oyster shell, attaches a few dozen tube feet to the outside of each valve and starts to pull. After a while the oyster gets tired, the shell opens up, and the starfish pushes its stomach out through its mouth opening, wraps the stomach around the soft parts of the oyster and digests it right in the shell! ”

“ Starfish begin to eat voraciously when quite young; one less than 3/8th in. across has been observed to eat over fifty young clams of half that length in six days. The more a starfish has to eat the quicker it grows, and it may become sexually mature in less than a year, then producing many thousands of young. Fortunately the increase is kept in check by many causes. The young, while still in the stage of free-swimming larvae, are swallowed in millions by various fish. When they settle down on seaweed their bright colours attract eels and many small fishes. ”

“ The bird’s-foot starfish is not very often seen, for it lives some little way below low-water mark. But sometimes, when there has been a violent storm at a season of spring-tide—and you will remember that spring-tides come whenever there is a new moon or a full moon—it is flung upon the beach by the retreating waves, and you may find it lying on the sand when the tide is out. ”

“ Then, when it has digested their bodies, it returns their empty shells through its mouth. And it can even eat such big creatures as mussels and oysters. Indeed, starfishes are the very worst enemies of the oyster-beds, and in one fishery alone, on the coast of North America, they are said to destroy more than ten thousand pounds’ worth of oysters every year!
Plate XXXV
1. THE FIVE-FINGERED STARFISH.2. THE BIRD’S-FOOT STARFISH.
A very strange fact about the starfish is that if one of its rays is cut off, a new one very soon grows in its place. ”

“ The starfish are the scavengers of the sea, but unfortunately do not confine their attentions to decaying matter; they eat oysters, clams, mussels, barnacles, sea-snails, worms, Crustacea and even smaller starfish. There is constant war between oyster-fishers and starfish; no less than 42,000 bushels of starfish were removed from the oyster-beds of Connecticut in a single year, but not till they had worked damage to the amount of $631,500. The simplest way in which a starfish eats is by taking small bits of food into the stomach, and ejecting the refuse again through the mouth. ”

“ Briefly, among the starfish people—and including also the sea-urchins and sea-cucumbers, the curious brittle-stars and feather-stars—parental care is the exception, and not the rule. Having cast their eggs adrift upon the sea, the mothers of the families leave the rest to nature. Let us follow the history of one of these eggs. No sooner is it adrift than it begins a very remarkable career. ”

“ We get another glimpse of the intensity of the seashore struggle for existence in the frequency of "shifts for a living," adaptations of structure or of behaviour which meet frequently recurrent vicissitudes. The starfish is often in the dilemma of losing a limb or its life; by a reflex action it jettisons the captured arm and escapes. And what is lost is gradually regrown. The crab gets its leg broken past all mending ”

“ This is by far the commonest of all the starfishes. You can seldom walk for even a short distance along the shore without seeing it. And no doubt you might think that it must be a very harmless creature indeed, for it does not [107] look as if it could injure any other animal in any way at all. Yet it is really a creature of prey, and feeds upon shell-bearing molluscs, such as small bivalves, which it always swallows whole. ”

“ IN the sea, once upon a time, O my Best Beloved, there was a Whale, and he ate fishes. He ate the starfish and the garfish, and the crab and the dab, and the plaice and the dace, and the skate and his mate, and the mackereel and the pickereel, and the really truly twirly-whirly eel. All the fishes he could find in all the sea he ate with his mouth—so! Till at last there was only one small fish left in all the sea, and he was a small ‘Stute Fish, and he swam a little behind the Whale’s right ear, so as to be out of harm’s way. ”

“ The starfishes live upon animal food—mainly other mollusks, which they kill in a very curious manner. When, in crawling about, they come upon a whelk or clam or oyster, they creep over it and clasp it in their five arms in a murderous embrace from which there is no escape. ”

“ Starfishes (Asteroidea) .—The starfishes feed on other marine animals, especially shell-fish and crabs. They are also reputed to destroy young fish. By means of their sucking-tubes, or tube-feet with sucker tips, they can seize and hold their prey firmly. They do much injury to oyster-beds by attacking and devouring the oysters. When attacking prey too large to be taken into the mouth the starfish everts its stomach over the prey and devours it. The stomach is afterward drawn back into the body-cavity by special muscles. ”

“ There is no heart or blood vessels. The motions of the stomach and the bending of the rays give motion to this fluid in the body cavity. It cannot be called blood, but it contains white blood corpuscles.
The starfish when first hatched is an actively swimming bilateral animal, but it soon becomes starlike (Fig. 60) . The limy plates of the starfish belong neither to the outer nor to the inner layer (endoderm and ectoderm) of the body wall, but to a third or middle layer (mesoderm) ; for echinoderms, like the polyps, belong to the three-layered animals. ”

“ All these tubes, cilia, and points of starfish head, found folded tightly down; tubes and points clinging to bulbous neck and torso. Flexibility surprising despite vast toughness.
At bottom of torso, rough but dissimilarly functioning counterparts of head arrangements exist. Bulbous light-gray pseudoneck, without gill suggestions, holds greenish five-pointed starfish arrangement.
Tough, muscular arms four feet long and tapering from seven inches diameter at base to about two and five tenths at point. ”

“ It can laugh at the rage of the oysterman, who angrily tears it in pieces, for “time heals all wounds” literally in the case of these creatures, and even if the five arms are torn apart, five starfish, small of arm but with healthy stomachs, will soon be foraging on the oyster bed. ”

“ Brittle starfishes are very active animals, and when they are alive their long slender rays are always wriggling and coiling and twisting about, hardly ever seeming to be still for a single moment. Indeed, one naturalist compares a brittle starfish to five very long and active centipedes stitched to a tiny pin-cushion! ”

“ Pick up your starfish, carry 194 it to the nearest field, and pluck a daisy close to the head. How interesting the comparison becomes, now that the knowledge of its meaning is plain. Anything which grows fast upon a single immovable stem tends to grow equally in all directions. We need not stop here, for we may include sea anemones and corals, those most marvellously coloured flowers of the sea, which grow upon a short, thick stalk and send out their tentacles equally in all directions. ”

“ Examine a live sea urchin, or the common five-rayed starfish, in a rock pool or aquarium, and it will be seen to possess a large number of soft, flexible, and protrusible processes, each of which terminates in a little sucking-disc that enables the animal to obtain a good ‘foot-hold;’ and, having fixed itself on one side by means of a number of these little ‘feet,’ it is enabled, by the contraction of certain muscles, to pull itself along. ”

“ But since the mouth is quite small and the food often large, the starfish finds it more convenient to turn its stomach inside out and to wrap it around the animal to be eaten, which is then digested quietly and the stomach withdrawn again. ”

“ Soon after the formation of the mouth, our growing starfish develops his first organs of locomotion. Now, these are neither arms nor legs, but take the form of short hair-like growths, endowed with the power of rapid waving motion, whereby the body is propelled through the water. ”