Some beasts were meant to have eyes; some were not. Starfish, which already operate in that terrifying and nebulous shadow world of animals who behave like plants (oddly enough, these are more frightening than plants that behave like animals), were not meant to. A starfish is a mouth wrapped in a hand. A starfish is a waking nightmare that moves by hydraulics. They are already sentient, living hands with a mouth at the center that spend their lives clinging remorselessly to reefs and aquaria capable of regenerating at will; they do not need dim and dawning eyes furrowing about at the end of their limbs. And yet they have. And yet they have.
Despite the confirmation of sea star sight, the animals won’t be developing reputations for great vision any time soon.
“The image formed in the starfish eye is a very crude image,” says study co-author Garm. “It only has about 200 pixels.”
But it’s enough to enable the blue sea star to recognize large, immovable structures, he said.
This species is tightly tied to coral reefs. If it wandered off to the sandy flats surrounding those reefs, it wouldn’t be able to find food and would eventually starve.
How does one wipe the sensation of eyes and horror off of one’s limbs? Tell me no more; I cannot bear it, I cannot bear the thought of crawling eyes along the sea floor.
Starfish have compound eyes, like the ones on arthropods such as insects or lobsters, but the resemblance ends there, Garm says. For instance, blue sea star eyes lack lenses, unlike arthropods’ eyes.
GOOD GOD. Lenseless lobster eyes, flailing half-blindly, dimly groping their way along a reef, longing for home, unprotected from grit and flotsam, grotesquely searching out for it knows not what.
Garm and colleagues combined physical measurements of the eye itself with behavioral experiments to come to their conclusions.
One such measure gave researchers an idea of how wide the sea star field of view was: large enough to pick out a coral reef in front of them.
“Home,” the eye-hand-mouth ball gasps, dragging itself further along the sand. “Home.”
Their behavioral observations involved moving individual blue sea stars off of a coral reef near Okinawa, Japan, to see if the animals could make their way back or not.
Starfish displaced about three feet (a meter) from the reef walked back home in pretty much a straight line. But animals placed either six feet (two meters) or 12 feet (four meters) away ended up wandering around randomly.
Starfish placed three feet (a meter) away from their reef at night also wandered around randomly, most likely because they couldn’t see the reef, said Garm.
Merciful heaven, don’t anger them. Don’t rip them from the only home they know just to test their eyes, you fools. If they can see, they can remember. If they can remember, they can take revenge. A sea floor riddled with bumbling, irritated, lost and wandering starfish capable of seeing through a glass but darkly is the last thing this troubled planet needs.
“The large sunflower star (Pycnopodia helianthoides) found on the Pacific coast is a fast and efficient predator which is often observed to chase down and swallow its food,” he said. Mah would love to know whether vision plays a part in this large animal’s ability to capture food.
Garm and colleagues have their sights set on a large starfish species, but not the sunflower star.
Instead, Garm plans to look at the visual system in the crown-of-thorns sea star (Acanthaster planci), responsible for devouring major areas of coral reefs off the coasts of Australia and Asia.
“It’d be nice to [know] if they use vision to see the reef,” Garm said. He hopes to use the information to potentially protect areas like the Great Barrier Reef from this voracious predator.
There are some things we do not need to know; turn away before you learn something you cannot unlearn. Nothing named after a crown of thorns need be meddled with. It eats reefs. It devours coral and petrified rocks and the frozen corpse of calcareous algae dead since time immemorial. Let me set your mind at ease now: it can see. Oh, gods, it can see. Go back. Go back to your wife and your sweet children and your bed at night, and thank God for the sunlight in your own life, and meddle not with the eyes of the writhing hand-mouths of the deep sea.
Tags: i see you, science, starfish, things that should not be, why
um, DUH, of course starfish have eyes. Don’t you remember “Peach” from “Finding Nemo”?
I do not.
If they can see, they can remember. If they can remember, they can take revenge.
will i ever stop screaming
2018: The discovery that starfish have intelligence equivalent to a human’s.
2026: Mind-meld technology reveals a starfish that retains memories of being human.
A specific human.
A specific living human.
Well, that was chilling.
… this is actually less terrifying than the idea I’ve been carrying around in my head since I was five. I thought starfish were pretty much all eyes.
I guess that’s not strictly true: I thought they had eyes all the way ’round the perimeter of their bodies, in a star-shape. (I think there was a misunderstanding during a kindergarten field trip to the aquarium.) Can you imagine, having eyes all the way around your limbs? YIKES. Having only five eyes is practically homey.
You might have been confusing starfish and scallops? Which do, actually, have eyes all the way around the openings of their shells. BEHOLD: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/201…
No, you lie.
You lie, or all good things are gone.
They are pretty eyes though.
Scollops do have eyes all the way around the edge of their mantle. Blue eyes if I remember rightly.
http://www.phy.duke.edu/~hsg/162/images/scallop-e…
You’re not going to like this: some jellyfish have ‘eyes’. Moon jellies have been shown to navigate by the sun; they seem to have light-sensing organisms. I believe that Lion’s-mane jellies may also be able to sense light and navigate by the sun; who knows how much they really see? (Actually, not a lot – they have no brains)
Scallops have eyes too – eighty of them. They’re blue, and gleam like tiny sapphires.
I feel like we’d get along, for I am the obnoxious person who brings up scallop eye color every time I am near seafood.
How will I ever chow down on the sweet sweet adductor muscle after learning this? They’re like blue googly eyes!
I just googled “scallop eyes” and am DELIGHTED with the images that showed up.
Dear LORD, those are some Seussian-levels of delightful odd blue eyeballs.
Now I want to find a scallop and have a staring contest with it!
You are all monsters. Those pictures are terrifying!
CORRECT. The right phrase is not “delightful” but “cartoonishly horrific.”
I too am tickled pink by these images. They’re darling! I want one as a pet. Or three for dinner.
okay no jellyfish are already terrifying with how they’re infesting and eventually completely ruling the sunlit part of water you don’t need to make them even scarier.
also no no no no i googled scallop eyes because i am foolhardy and stupid and recoiled and gasped so loud that i dropped the mouse and couldn’t click the X fast enough to get rid of that tab. it is the worst.
I have just now realized that the “scallop” edge of the scallops is rippled TO MAKE LITTLE POCKETS FOR THEIR MANY EYES.
How do you consistently knock it out of the park like this, Mallory?
No knowing, squeamish, half-hearted ‘eww creepy’ for you, no, you have made me afraid of starfish.
I liked starfish.
petition to eradicate sea life
Don’t worry, we’re on it.
sad rimshot
Oh god, are we ever 🙁 🙁 🙁
I’ve been to a couple of (colloquia? colloquiums?) presentations which basically boil down to “starfish and sea urchins are doing great though! Like a little too great!”
The ocean is a nightmare place and I’m pretty impressed that you wrote this post without using the word “maw”.
“…grotesquely searching out for it knows not what.”
I know what: OUR SOULS.
Mallory, just because you’re sick and angry at the world doesn’t mean you get to scare the rest of us away from ever setting foot in the ocean again.
my throat hurts linda
I know, I’m sorry. At least you aren’t a starving starfish who was placed 6 feet away from home.
When you enter the ocean, you enter the food chain.
It’s okay. Some of us were ALREADY terrified of entering the ocean after the giant jellyfish post. (Wait was that here or on the hairpin a few years ago anyway it was terrifying.)
We’re glad to know of more reasons our completely irrational phobia of the beach and ocean isn’t actually irrational after all.
Animals that act like plants are the most horrifying. Thank the sea-gods that crinoids mostly vanished 252 million years ago.
You told us we would always have the option of taking to the sea.
You told us that.
Now you are telling us that the sea is a hell of grasping, staring, reef-devouring hand-eye-mouth monsters.
Whither now, Mallory?
Whither now?
I really want to like this comment about 28 more times.
Could we take to a large lake?
Do you know what kind of things live in lakes? Do you know that some of them want to eat your brain?
Do you know? Do you know?
SWEET FANCY MOSES
but what about all the loch nesses
I think the point is the that sea, full of terrifying eye-having star demons and creatures so abhorrent they dare not even show themselves lest we kill them all on sight, is still preferable to having to interact with men.
Oh, man. This is fantastic. BRB, sending this to my friend who loves the ocean *and* creepy stuff. Bless you, Mallory.
So they basically have 360-degree vision, right? And they have as many eyes as they have arms, which can be a lot? That’s as awesome as it is horrifying, you have to admit.
(trying and failing to make some kind of ocean/ “depth” perception joke)
Did you also know they extrude their stomachs to eat?
That never fails to gross me out, and I’ll happily watch dissections while eating dinner :/
So wait. WAIT.
When you (“you” meaning not you, but the you you were as a callous youth in your ruffled yellow bikini on a day at the shore, listening to your big brother tell you ‘fun facts’ about tide pools) chopped off the starfish’s arm, because, HEY! they grow back!… you were actually chopping off it’s EYESTALK?
Jesus.
and it’s been looking for your blurry outline ever since.
“Lenseless lobster eyes, flailing half-blindly, dimly groping their way along a reef, longing for home, unprotected from grit and flotsam, grotesquely searching out for it knows not what.”
I think that’s how I spent my 20s.
You know, I didn’t used to be afraid of starfish. Thanks, Mallory.
Scallops have a distressing number of eyes (all the blue dots are eyes): http://www.wildlife-art.net/images/kimberley131.j…
And mantis shrimp! Mantis shrimp are just generally terror-inducing (no crustacean should be able to cause cavitation in water) but their eyes are terrifyingly sophisticated. http://phys.org/news/2013-09-mantis-shrimp-world-…
And cuttlefish eyes! They can see polarization but not colour and the pupils are shaped like W’s! The ocean is full of the best/scariest stuff.
No organism should be able to cause cavitation using muscles alone, but if someone was going to do it, it’s pretty much going to be crustaceans.
BARREL EYE FISH ALSO HAVE WEIRD EYES
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barreleye
I am so into this discussion of sea creatures and their strange eyes.
2nded on scallop eyes being fucking terrifying. Think of those next time you imagine shell gasoline or the little mermaid’s bikini top. I think a starfish is kind of cute having lil eyeballs on the ends of its nubbins.
How do they know the starfish need their eyes to get around on the reef? This is from the original research paper:
“Five adult-sized specimens (25–30 cm) had their eyes removed with a pair of scissors (two ossicles also had to be removed to get access to the eyes), while five others were sham operated (each arm had two tube feet and two ossicles removed from the middle part). The animals were left to recover and were tested the day after.”
Imagine some asshole coming along and just hacking your eyes off with a pair of scissors.
WHY