#echinoderm

A record die-off of sea stars was followed by something that stunned biologists

The creatures almost went extinct along the West Coast a decade ago. Recently, they have been making a comeback.

Six months ago, Menge’s team published exciting research — five-legged sea stars were undergoing a significant “baby boom.” The tide pools were denser than they had been before the disease, and the juveniles were eating mussels and clearing space for other species. In short, something rare and wonderful was happening on the Oregon Coast: One of the intertidal zone’s most important predators had returned from the brink...

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More echinoderm fun facts! Not only are echinoderms’ bodies mostly built using the head regions of bilaterian genetics, but they also have a distributed nervous system that all together acts as an all-body brain!

Excerpt:

With hundreds of different types of neurons, sea urchins express both echinoderm head genes and genes also found in the central nervous system of vertebrates. It used to be thought that echinoderms such as sea urchins, sea stars and sea cucumbers had a primitive nerve net, in which some of the diffuse neurons throughout their bodies may form ganglia that serve them as nerve centers, but not all decentralized nervous systems are created equal. The adult sea urchin nervous system is more like a brain that extends through the entire creature.

“The complexity of the sea urchin nervous system, as characterized by the diversity of postmetamorphic neuronal cell type signatures and their integration of diverse PRC systems, leads us to propose that the sea urchin nervous system in its entirety comprises an ‘all-brain’ rather than a ‘no-brain’ state,” the researchers said in a study recently published in Science Advances.

Giant Basket Star for a $15 Ko-fi supporter

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