the.com/starfish
a brainless predator that digests prey by turning its own stomach inside out
means a star-shaped marine animal (an echinoderm, not actually a fish) with five or more radiating arms that creeps along the seabed and eats by everting its stomach onto its prey.
from A plain English compound of "star" + "fish," naming the obvious: a sea creature shaped like a star. "Star" descends from Old English steorra, a word with deep Germanic roots and Latin/Greek cousins (stella, aster). "Fish" is the old catch-all for almost anything that lived in water — which is why early namers, untroubled by zoology, lumped this spiny radial animal in with the fishes. Biologists now wince and call it a sea star, since it has no backbone, no gills, and no business being called a fish.
- no brain
- survives just fine without one
- regrowth
- can regenerate a whole body from one arm
- eyes
- has an eye on each arm tip
- not fish
- closer kin to sea urchins
- eating style
- ejects stomach onto prey, then slurps
crown of thorns starfish — invasive species destroying coral reefs across the indo-pacific, particularly the great barrier reef
sea star wasting disease — mass mortality event killing starfish along north american coasts since 2013
asterina gibbosa — reproducing asexually in aquariums worldwide, creating clones of itself