, or sea stars, are brilliant and resilient ocean creatures. These bottom-dwelling echinoderms have a central disc body covered in tough calcium carbonate skin that helps provide support and protection for their vital organs and complex circulatory system. Starfish are so resilient that they can even regenerate lost arms.
If a predator gets lucky and successfully bypasses a starfish's tough skin and muscles, the severed arm seals itself, and special migrate to the location to start growing a new limb. Advertisement These intriguing sea animals also reproduce asexually using a different regeneration ability called binary fission. Binary fission occurs when organisms divide their cells into two genetically daughter cells.
These eggs are then mixed with sperm released into the seawater to self-fertilize. Sea stars do not have a brain in the traditional sense, but they do possess "eyes" at the ends of their rays that sense visible light. This is why sea stars thrive in coral reefs and rocky coves near the surface where sunlight and warm water is abundant.
Advertisement Sea stars are slow and methodical predators that feast on whatever food they can track down. They use hundreds (or even thousands) of tiny tube feet to contact and entangle urchins, clams, mussels and small fish — typically other organisms that subsist on algae and phylum. Starfish begin eating their prey by inverting their stomachs.
The stomach will turn inside out and extend through the mouth to infiltrate past.