Starfish have hundreds of feet but no brain

Image courtesy of Matthew McHenry and Eva Kanso

Joel Kontinen

Starfish feet are coordinated purely through mechanical loading, enabling the animals to bounce rhythmically along the seabed without a central nervous system.

How do starfish move? It’s not by using their feet, although they do have small feet just under their belly, and they have no brains.

But they have been given intelligently designed  little feet and a thing that is like a central nervous system.

“Starfish coordinate hundreds of feet to hop about – and they do it without a brain. A new understanding of how they manage this could inspire underwater exploration robots that work on the same principles.

The marine invertebrates, also known as sea stars, lift their bodies off the ground with their tiny tubular feet to move across underwater surfaces like rocks and sand. “[The feet are] almost like mini-organisms, all sort of attached to the same body – and you’ve got hundreds of them,” says the one who published this,  “

Surce:

 Christa Lesté-Lasserre, 2024, Starfish have hundreds of feet but no brain – here's how they move | New Scientist 16 April.

Jurassic Starfish found in the British isles

 

An ancient seabed emerges from a cleaned limestone slab (Image courtesy of The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London.

Joel Kontinen 

Researcher have found perhaps tens of thousands of marine invertebrates called echinoderms — meaning "hedgehog skin" in Greek, and including the ancient ancestors of modern starfish, sea cucumbers, sea urchins and frilly-limbed sea lilies — immaculately preserved at all stages of their life cycles, the researchers said in a statement.

 

They were found beneath a limestone quarry in the U.K.'s Cotswolds region.

 According to evolutionists, the site dates to the middle Jurassic period, roughly 200 million to 145 million years ago, when dinosaurs ruled the world. 

Source:

Specktor, Brandon, 2021, Enormous graveyard of alien-like sea creatures discovered at 'Jurassic Pompeii' in central UK Live Science  29 July,