What Does Starfish Eat? What Is The Feeding Mechanism?

Hello, it's us again! =)

Are you thinking what does a starfish eat and what is the feeding mechanism? 

If yes, you're in for a treat as we'll be diving into the types of food starfishes eat and its feeding mechanism! =)

Starfish are powerful hunters and primarily feed on mollusks. Their main sources of food are clams, oysters sand dollars and mussels, which are usually attached to rocks or otherwise unable to escape quickly. They also eat snails and injured fish, when they can find them!

Some species find decomposing plants and animals in the water or on the beach and consume them, making for much easier prey but lower nutritional value and increased competition from birds. Other starfish hunt in the water, catching sponges, plankton and even coral for their dinner!

Specifically for Chocolate chip starfish, they are scavengers, eating foods that have dropped to the bottom of the tank, but they are also predators and will eat corals, as well as killing and eating many small animals, even snails. You can feed your chocolate chip star fish meaty foods such as muscles, shrimp and squid! Yummy! =)

So how do starfishes eat?

The truth is that starfish are actually very clever at staying alive. Their most vulnerable parts, including the mouth and stomach, actually face the rocks or ground they cling to. 

When a starfish has captured a mollusk, it first wraps itself around the creature tightly. Then it uses its powerful arms to break the muscles that hold a mollusk's shell together, exposing the meaty interior. 

After that, the starfish actually pushes its stomach out of its mouth and eats the contents of the mollusk whole. When it's done, the starfish re-swallows its stomach and begins to digest its meal more fully!

The starfish is eating the shrimp! Yummy! =)

As the shrimp is fed to the starfish, the starfish uses the tube feet to move the shrimp towards the stomach.

Here's a video for you guys to check out on how a starfish eats a shrimp!

Enjoy the video guys!

Hope y'all are well-fed with the information on what does starfish eat and their feeding mechanism!

STARFISH, lighting the way to biomimicry!

Till' next time! =)

Anatomy of A Starfish!

Greetings to All Starfish Lovers!

Before diving into knowing more about a starfish, let's begin by with the ANATOMY of a STARFISH!

The Anatomy of A Starfish!

Locomotion of a starfish!

A starfish is a unique animal that lives on the seafloor. As everyone knows, seafloor is never always flay but usually consist of plenty of corals and rocks. Due to this nature, animal that lives under it tends to have Benthic locomotion in order to adapt to the Geography.

Not always like that

But like that

So, what is a Benthic locomotion?

Benthic loomotion describes the movement of animals that utilizes tube like legs which could create vacuum through contracting their muscles. This allow the animal to cling to the wall of rocks or coral easily. With this, waves of tube feets could moves along the surface by contracting and relaxing their muscles which allows the animal to moves along. Based on the criteria, starfish is categorized as animal that utilizes Benthic locomotion. Check out the GIF image below!

Illustration of a single tube feet moving
Source: http://www.madreporite.com/science/tubefootanimation.gif

Below shows our chocolate chip starfish moving using its unique Benthic locomotion system!

*Fast Forwarded* because they walk quite slowly!

Cholocate Chip??

YES! You read it right, Chocolate Chip star fish is the common name of our adopted animal whereas the scientifical name is called Protoreaster nodosus.

The reason we choose starfish is simply because of the curiosity of our team to explore something different. Thus, we will spend our entire semester observing and get inspired by it!

Thanks to Google map, we manage to locate an awesome aquatic center which is located right beside Subang airport named Aquatic International SDN. BHD. where we manage to obtain this extraordinary sea creatures here.

Aquatic International SDN. BHD.

OUR STARFISH!

They just chillin in the tank~~

So you might be wondering why do they named in such an odd way as "Chocolate Chip star fish". This is because their upper body is filled with chocolaty thorn like knobs which function as a meant to deter predators, by making them difficult to be swallowed WHOLE!

Thus their name is originated based on their look. Interesting thing about this is, it can also be applied to Biomimetics!

So we hope that this little interesting fact will help us in attracting you to join us through our upcoming Biomimicry journey and stay tune for more interesting facts and discovery!