Animal · United Kingdom, Ireland, Norway
Common starfish
Asterias rubens — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The common starfish has neither a head nor a face, and yet at the tip of every single one of its arms there sits a tiny eye. It creeps over the seabed on hundreds of small suction feet.
Picture credit: Espen Rekdal / Espen Rekdal Photography (CC BY 4.0) · W.carter (CC0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the common starfish live?
Home: on rocks, gravel and mussel beds in the north-east Atlantic.
In the wild it lives in these countries: the United Kingdom, Ireland, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, France.
The short profile
Fully grown: 10 to 30 cm across, rarely 52 cm. It weighs about 0.15 kilograms. On the menu: meat.
The story behind it
Turn a starfish over and you find hundreds of soft little tubes moving like fingers. Each tube foot works on water pressure and ends in a sucker, and together they can pull a mussel open. A gap of one millimetre is enough: the starfish pushes its stomach out through its mouth, slides it between the shells and digests the mussel on the spot. Right at the tip of each arm sits an eyespot built from many small light sensors. In related sea stars, researchers showed that such eyes give a coarse, blurry picture, enough to steer towards a reef. If an arm is lost, a new one grows back over one or two years.
Find it on the globe
Common starfish is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
Does a starfish have eyes?
Yes, one small eye at the tip of each arm. Because it has no head, its five eyes look in five directions at the same time.
Where can you find a common starfish?
Can a starfish regrow an arm?
Yes. A new arm grows back in about one to two years, and the animal keeps on eating and moving while it does.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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