When the starfish squeezes the ampulla it extends the tube foot in the direction it wants to go. Each tube foot is connected to its own tiny sac called an ampulla, that sits inside the body of the starfish. The long slender tube feet are hollow and full of water, like miniature water balloons. On the undersides of the arms are hundreds, sometimes thousands, of tiny tube feet called podia. Most sea stars have five arms, though some have more - up to 25 in some species. Starfish are actually voracious predators that scour the seafloors of oceans all around the world searching for prey. But most people have never seen them do anything more than clamp down on a rock, motionless, as they wait out a low tide. Starfish, also called sea stars, are one of the most recognizable and familiar animals in the sea. Starfish only bounce like this if they’re in a hurry. Since then, Johnson and Ellers have worked to change the way we understand these animals, who have successfully made a home on this planet for at least 450 million years.Īs part of this mission, the two scientists joined a bicoastal collaboration that may one day lead to robots that could move around like starfish to search shipwrecks, clean oceangoing vessels and explore the seafloor. “That moment we first saw them go faster by bouncing completely transformed everything we were planning to do with our research.” “It was an absolute epiphany,” said Johnson who studies how sea stars move and teaches marine biology along with Ellers at Bowdoin College in Maine. The starfish in Tatsuo Motokawa’s lab weren’t content slowly gliding across the floor of their tank, they bounced and galloped, zooming around their enclosure.įor one of the most familiar animals in the sea, this was a new behavior, never before described in the scientific literature. On an extended research visit to a friend’s lab in Tokyo, marine biologists Amy Johnson and Olaf Ellers witnessed something they’d never seen before.
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