The Evolutionary Mystery of Starfish: Do They Only Consist of Heads?

Starfish consist of 5 identical arms, and any of these arms can take the lead during movement.

Their unusual bodies have led many experts to suggest that starfish do not have a head, in other words, these marine creatures consist only of bodies.

A new study featured in Independent Turkish and published in the respected scientific journal Nature suggests that starfish actually consist of only heads.

THERE ARE HEAD DEVELOPMENT GENES, THE OTHERS ARE MISSING

US scientists, including researchers from California and Stanford universities, examined starfish using high-tech molecular and genomic methods.

While the team detected gene signatures associated with head development almost everywhere in the baby starfish, they found that gene expression encoding an animal’s body and tail parts was largely missing.

The findings suggest that starfish lost their bodies during the evolutionary process and became only heads.

“It’s as if the starfish’s body is missing entirely. These can best be described as heads crawling on the sea floor,” said Laurent Formery, lead author of the study:

That’s definitely not what scientists assumed about starfish.

Explaining the method they used in the research, Christopher Lowe, co-author of the article, said: “If you skin an animal and look at the genes that play a role in defining the head and tail, you will see that the same genes code for these body parts in all animal groups.”

So we ignored the anatomy and asked: Is there a hidden molecular axis beneath all this strange anatomy? What is its role, if any, in the formation of the starfish’s five-fold body structure?

The research team created a three-dimensional map to determine where genes were expressed as the starfish developed and grew. Eventually, he was able to identify the genes that control the development of the starfish’s ectoderm, which includes its skin and nervous system.

Previous research has found strange fossils of starfish ancestors that appear to have some kind of body. New research may show that these fossils are actually much more meaningful from an evolutionary perspective.

Starfish; It belongs to a group of creatures called echinoderms that includes sea urchins, sand dollars and sea cucumbers.

These unusual animals have a unique body structure, typically arranged in 5 equal sections, with the left and right sides symmetrical.

It is thought that there are 1,500 species of starfish in the world, from tropical regions to cold polar waters. These can generally go down to a depth of 6 thousand meters.

2023-11-04 21:03:00
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