meggory84:

bogleech:

mothboy-official:

bogleech:

cassidyrose144:

this cuttlefish was NOT happy about this starfish trying to touch him

they shouldn’t be! Most starfish are predators and it would’ve eaten them if they were sick, injured or trapped!

It’s 1am and I’m finding out that starfish are predators.

here are some more things about that:

They don’t have teeth or jaws *in their mouths*, so the most common starfish feeding method is to simply cover their prey, usually a clam or a snail or something else very slow, and flip their own stomach inside-out to smother and digest the prey externally.

I specify “in their mouths” because in some starfish the entire body surface is blanketed in extremely tiny jaw-like structures, sometimes thousands of them. These can be purely defensive or they can be a means of making the starfish “sticky” to small prey such as shrimp.

While most sea stars simply rely on eating things slower than themselves – sometimes including healthy, but sleeping fish – there are also stars who form an ambush trap ike this. Small animals try to hide under this nice cave and then the starfish clamps down on them to do the stomach trick.

Also this isn’t related to them killing things but most sea stars have fully functioning eyes, almost invisibly tiny, at the end of each arm.

this was educational but also gave me slow-motion anxiety for that little cuttlefish

Don’t worry, cuttlefish are fast and intelligent. Certainly more intelligent than something with no brain. Plus, that looks like one of the scavenging species of starfish. It was probably just going in that general direction rather than trying to eat the cuttlefish.