A pair of babes

I explored a new area on the beach at low tide, and found many tiny starfish, mostly mottled stars, all looking healthy.

Here's one:

Star, Evasterias troschelli, with my fingertip and a baby sea urchin. I don't know what the brown circle is.

I have small fingers; that fingernail is 1/2 inch across at the widest point, which makes the baby star just under an inch, arm tip to arm tip, and the urchin about 1/8 of an inch, not counting the spines.

No star is an island

A few more starfish. But nothing on the shore lives alone; the more time you spend looking, the more complex you realize the community is. Even in a simple photo of a stone and a star, there's something I didn't see until I got it home.

I think these two are juvenile mottled stars. Look for the fly on the upper snail shell, an opportunist dropping in for a snack as soon as I turned over the stone. Also if you look closely, you may find four baby (infant) sea urchins, tiny snails, and a flatworm.

Four-and-a-quarter arm star. Ochre sea star, with purple tips to his arms. On a bed of assorted seaweeds, over sandstone. Between the weed and the stone, a scramble of hermit crabs.

A small purple star with an unusual stripe down his arms. Around him on the stone, a few worms in their own casing of sand, exposed when I flipped the stone. The spirals are calcareous tubeworms, and the slimy stuff may be flatworm eggs, but I wonder about the patch at the bottom, with its smokestack.

Two more juvenile mottled stars. purple and pink, and blue and green. Also present; a hermit, all scrunched up, the remains of a bryozoan colony, barnacles, tubeworms, bits of a pink encrustation, and seaweed.

Coming up: worms, worms, worms.

All the little mouths

They bite.

Close view of a starfish's busy coat.

Solid white spines, translucent gills, and the biting pedicellariae; all those little open jaws.

I've been spending time sitting in front of the tank, chasing an annoying white crab, and noticed interactions between the mottled star and the other residents. The starfish wanders about slowly, minding his own business (finding something more to eat), ignoring anything not edible. He can afford to be complacent; he's wearing his own security guard.

A hermit crab passes him, and touches - just barely - an arm of the star, and immediately yanks away his pincer and backs off. The little annoying crab swats at anything that comes near him, like a kitten does. Unless it's the starfish. He raises a pincer to hit it, remembers, changes his mind, and goes to hide under a shell.

I watched as a few grains of sand fell onto the back of the starfish. They immediately started to move up over the arm, and off the other side.

The pedicellariae are at work.

More on the crab, later. I'm trying to get a photo of the shape of his carapace, but I'm sure he recognizes the camera already; he runs away as soon as he sees it.

 

Cuddly

It's amazing, sometimes, how such a voracious, efficient killing machine as a starfish can look so huggable.

Leading arm of hunting mottled sea star. Baby blues and soft pinks, for extra innocence.