ON THE WILD SIDE LEG IT DOWN TO THE ROCKPOOLS

WITH so many storms recently, if you are close to the sea you may notice more starfish washing up than usual.

You probably remember looking in rockpools for starfish during seaside summer holidays as a child. Almost certainly the starfish you would encounter hanging out in the shallow water would be the “common starfish”, aptly named as despite having around 30 species in our waters, they are the most abundant.

Starfish are in the same family as sea urchins. Don’t really look all that similar aside from both being terrifying and alien? Well they both have five-part symmetry.

The common starfish is found in every part of British waters except for fresh water. They need salt water to survive because they have no blood.

That’s right, they pump seawater around their body as fake blood. Freaky. The common starfish classically has five arms, although rarely can have four to eight.

The Latin name of the common starfish simply means “red star”, and they are an orangery red colour, although it isn’t uncommon to find purple specimens! They prefer to hang out on loose rocks and gravel, and have no eyes, but “smell” food via chemical receptors in their thousands of sucker feet.

Starfish keep all their organs in their legs and if they lose a leg they can regenerate it… and if enough organs are in the severed leg, the leg can re-grow a whole new starfish!

They grow depending on how much food is in the area, and can actually shrink if there is nothing to eat! When they find a shellfish they want to eat they sucker on to it with their grabby feet, then try to pull it open. They only need to get the shell to open less than 1mm, then they can turn their stomach inside out into the shell they want to eat and digest it from the inside out. Horrifying!

The common starfish is breeding right now.

They have the ability to be both male and female so when they have settled on a gender the female releases around two and a half million eggs into the sea, where they are fertilised, hatch, and float around as tiny algae invaders until they sink to the sea floor after around 90 days. Here they can expect to live a healthy five to10 years.