Starfish bodies are just heads, new research says – CNN
Starfish bodies are just heads, new research says – CNN
The heads of most animals are easily identifiable, but scientists haven’t been able to say the same for sea stars — until now.
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
A starfish has five identical arms with a layer of “tube feet” beneath them that can help the marine creature move along the seafloor, causing naturalists to puzzle over whether sea stars have defined front and back ends — and if they have heads at all.
The revelations, made possible by new methods of genetic sequencing, could help answer some of the biggest remaining questions about echinoderms, including their shared ancestry with humans and other animals that look nothing like them.
“This has been a zoological mystery for centuries,” said senior study coauthor Christopher Lowe, marine and developmental biologist at Stanford University, in a statement.
Then, members of the team used advanced analytical techniques to spot where genes were expressed within the tissue and pinpoint specific sequences of RNA within the cells.
“When we compared the expression of genes in a starfish to other groups of animals, like vertebrates, it appeared that a crucial part of the body plan was missing,” Thompson said.
Sea stars and other echinoderms likely evolved their unique body plans once their ancestors lost their trunk region, allowing them to move and feed differently from other animals.
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