Starfish are a very primitive animal - been around unchanged for a long long time and very adaptable to a wide range of ecological niches. Basically - in one word - bulletproof.
I remember in Boston hearing stories of the lobster fishermen finding starfish in their pots, hacking them into pieces and throwing them overboard not realizing that they had just created two or more new starfish as they can regenerate their limbs and central cores.
Now this - from Discover Magazine:
Starfish Ruin an Experiment and Reveal a Superpower
Scientists already knew starfish have superpowers. They can regenerate entire lost limbs or organs; some can even regrow a whole body from one arm. And these animals have just revealed another bizarre ability. To two Danish students, it first appeared as the power to really wreck an experiment.
At the University of Southern Denmark, students Frederik Ekholm Gaardsted Christensen and Trine Bottos Olsen were asked to tag some starfish. The task was simple: inject the Asterias rubens with microchips, the same kind that veterinarians implant in pet dogs. This would let researchers easily identify individual starfish later on. The technique had already been used successfully in sea urchins.
Starfish came to the university from local fishers who had caught them by accident. The students injected the tags into the animals as directed. But within days, those same tags showed up at the bottom of the tank. Somehow, the starfish were expelling the foreign objects from their bodies.
When the students witnessed the act, it was a little like a magic trick—one moment a magician’s hand is empty, and the next she’s holding a bird. The starfish pushed the tags out the ends of their arms, straight through the skin.
To find out more, the students and professor Daniel Levitis set up some experiments. First they injected tags into 53 starfish and scanned them each day to see how many of the tags were still there. In less than 3 weeks, all the tags were gone.
To exit out the ends of their arms is downright bizarre. Like I said, ancient and freaky. Paging Mr. Cthulhu, Mr. Cthulhu to the white courtesy phone please...
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