I’m obsessed with brittle stars: fish often nip off bits of their arms but they regenerate | Ocean acidification

forRetel stars have a lot of great features as a type. Many of them are biologists and can light blue light. Some will have patterns and display. These Chefan relatives of Starfish can be very beautiful to look at and come in a group of colors – in tropical areas, for example, can be red, black or orange. They have the spine throughout, so that they can look completely decorated.

They can also renew. Fish and other creatures often dismantle parts of their arms – known as internal predation – so that they constantly renew themselves. You can even cut all their arms, sometimes even half the disk, and the fragile star will remain in the renovation.

The fragile stars have the same radial symmetry and five arms such as the star of the sea, but their arms are much thinner and can be 60 cm long, depending on the species.

People talk about the blue planet but I think about the Earth as a brown planet, because most of the Earth’s environment is the sea floor. It is 361 square meters (140 square meters) and is full of sediments – and where there are deposits, there are often fragile stars. In total, there are about 2000 types of fragile stars and about half of them live in depths of more than 200 meters.

As part of SEASCAPE scanningShe studied fragile stars all over the world. A lot of comfort on rocks or on the surface of the sediments, but my favorite species are Amphiura filiformisA fragile star hiding around the British beaches. Its central disk is usually 5 mm width and it is very much – in a square area, you can find up to 3000 people of this type alone.

It is my favorite type because it constantly turns into the environment and changes it, and you can see this happens in front of you; You can see the fragile stars that move the particles around and make hills on the surface, inject oxygen into the sediments, and destroy the waste that fell on the sea floor.

When fragile stars such as amphiura come on the surface of the sea floor, put their arms up to capture the particles that pass with the current. When the currents become very slow or very fast, they will retreat to the burrows and feed on the sediments by moving the molecules under their arm to their mouth.

I was the first scientist to get time footage of the time of the fragile stars who do this. Nobody saw his activities below, and I am surprised by their activity and how the population was organized, and each of them has the same depth and spacing precisely like a row of soldiers.

The fragile stars are basically Zubalain – they will eat particles of anything organic, including fecal piles, the remains of dead fish that fell on the ocean bottom, and algae. It is very effective in this way – it takes everything that is presented to them.

But since pollution settles on the ocean floor and closes in the sediments, it is also very weak. They are not like fish that can swim away. They are stuck in the sediments, they must absorb it.

When it comes to the climate crisis, fragile stars are Canary in CoalMine because their bone structure consists of calcium carbonate: limestone, mainly. With high temperatures, ocean acidification begins to spread, it is literally reflected.

They are also types of stone. Like elephants in savanna that expel trees down, which allows grass to growth, they constantly adjust their environment and make them more benign to other types. Because they do this well and efficiently, their presence alone enhances the biological diversity in the sea floor.

Over the last half of a billion years, we passed a great diversification in life, and the fragile stars played an important role in this. They still have an important role to play. So I hope to realize how important these charismatic organisms are and put measures in place. As he said to Dona Ferguson