The thing about starfish is that you tend to forget the -fish part. But when you think about that, a lot of things come into focus. For example, the fact that besides its underwater life, it is nothing like a fish. For example: a starfish can push its stomach out of its mouth and eat the inside of a clam. Show me a fish that can do that.
The ones that are most common at the beaches near me feel as though they’re cut from shark skin, smooth and rough at the same time. They have webbed arms, not clearly delineated ones, and are the size of a coin. They are dull browns and greens and blues.
Next time you see a starfish, any starfish, look at the centre of it, on the side that faces the sky. Now look just off centre, and – whether it is large or small or spiny or pointy or bright blue or dull orange – you will see a roughly circle-shaped spot. Every starfish has one – it is called a madreporite – and every starfish uses it to suck water into its body to inflate its hundreds, or thousands, of tube-shaped feet.
If you really think about it, a starfish is a “a disembodied head walking about the sea floor on its lips”, according to a scientist named Thurston Lacalli.
“The lips having sprouted a fringe of tube feet, co-opted from their original function of sorting food particles, to do the walking.”
If I really think about it, I remember that you don’t sort food with your feet, but rather with your hands, and so a starfish is really a disembodied head walking around on hands that have grown out of its lips.
They’re also distantly related to us: we have the same 600m-year-old ancestor. And their feet coordinate despite each operating on its own: the starfish has a decentralised nervous system but, nonetheless, is moved by its many independent feet in one direction. It bounces a little as it does this, and the feet co-ordinate, it turns out, like a set of metronomes.
“Take a set of mechanical metronomes, devices used to help keep rhythm or time for a musician. You can start a set of 10 at all different phases, resting them on the same flat surface. Over time, they will synchronise,” according to an article about a University of Southern California study.
For a video showing this, scientists bought metronomes in a rainbow of bright colours:
The colleague who sent me this finds it strangely depressing, he says. To think about how this works makes me feel like I have just had a baby: my brain cannot function deeper than “What the fuck just happened?”.
In one of the books I read shortly after giving birth, a writer described her tiny daughter’s hands as starfish. It may have been Rachel Cusk in A Life’s Work, it may have been Rivka Galchen in Little Labours. Usually I can remember these things, or find them on the internet, which has become, like the starfish’s arms and legs, my extended brain.
But this time, I can’t – my brain’s hundreds of foot-suckers are reaching around inside my head, and it isn’t there. My literal hands have reached for both the books it could be on my shelves, and found that somehow in the weeks after giving birth, I did not have the foresight to underline things. My memory of that time is like what a starfish sees: lighter bits here, darker there. A baby carrier on the ground, my sticky skin, her little mouth.
Nonetheless, the author was right. Baby’s hands are starfish, and I had that thought hundreds of times after reading it: “Baby’s hands really are starfish, aren’t they. Now why did I come into this room?”.
They don’t close all the way, they’re not like brittle stars, with fingers radiating, waving around. They’re like a starfish when you lift it up, and flip it over, and its finger-arms move tentatively. And if you think about it, babies were like fish once, but now they are fish with five limbs, with necks and round heads and arms and legs: starfish.
Helen Sullivan is a Guardian journalist. She is writing a book for Scribner Australia
Do you have an animal, insect or other subject you’d like to see profiled by this columnist? Email helen.sullivan@theguardian.com
