A study published in the very serious American scientific journal “Nature” and written by researchers from the no less serious universities of Stanford and Berkeley, and even with the support of NASA, finally explains where the heads of starfish are located.
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The researchers immediately ask the question: If you had to put a hat or cap on a starfish, where would you put it? Difficult to say, because most living beings are designed on a bilateral and symmetrical plan, with a head, a trunk, legs or paws going in pairs and sometimes a tail. But the starfish is nothing like that. It follows a pentaradial model, that is to say with five branches. Where are the head, the arms, the trunk? American researchers led by a Frenchman, Laurent Formery, finally unraveled the mystery.
This required using ultra-modern techniques. The biologists first cut branches of starfish into small slices, while specifying that they would grow back. And from these tips, they used high-tech molecular and genetic techniques to understand the structure of the animal. They were thus able to create a 3D genetic atlas of the starfish.
A new piece of the Evolution puzzle
First surprise, starfish do not have a trunk. As for the head, there is not one, but several, distributed over the animal. Starfish have a sort of head in the center of each branch, and also one in their center.
If the mystery is solved, what’s the point of knowing? Research usually focuses on groups of animals that are similar to us. But according to the authors of this study, by focusing on what is familiar, we are less likely to learn something new. Sea stars have an advantage: we know almost nothing about them, neither their evolution, nor their role in the evolution of species. Laurent Formery concludes: “There, we now have a new piece of the puzzle on the Tree of Evolution.”