Nature & Environment
Starfish Squeezes Microchip Through the Tip of Its Arm with Weird Ability (VIDEO)
Catherine Griffin
First Posted: Jun 17, 2015 01:01 PM EDT
Starfish have some weird talents, and one of them is the ability to squeeze foreign objects along the length of their body and out through their arms. The newly discovered ability may shed some light on how animals are able to quickly heal themselves.
Researchers discovered the ability almost by accident. As a part of their studies, two biology students were asked to tag some starfish so that researchers could reidentify the starfish later. But the tags, which were injected into the starfish, didn't stay.
"But every time we put a tag into a starfish, they rid themselves of the tag within a few days," said the two students, Frederik Ekholm Gaardsted Christensen and Trine Bottos Olsen, in a news release. "It came out directly through the skin; the starfish simply pushed it out through the skin at the end of one arm and then went on as if nothing had happened."
Many animals are capable of removing some foreign objects from their body. For example, a splinter in your finger is eventually pushed out by your body. But when an object is lodged deep inside a body, like a bullet between internal organisms, most don't have a way to get rid of the object without surgery.
In the case of the starfish, the tag would wander seemingly randomly around between their organs before it would finally be squeezed out through an arm tip.
The findings are published in the journal The Biological Bulletin.
Want to see a starfish pushing out a foreign object? Check out the video below, courtesy of YouTube.
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First Posted: Jun 17, 2015 01:01 PM EDT
Starfish have some weird talents, and one of them is the ability to squeeze foreign objects along the length of their body and out through their arms. The newly discovered ability may shed some light on how animals are able to quickly heal themselves.
Researchers discovered the ability almost by accident. As a part of their studies, two biology students were asked to tag some starfish so that researchers could reidentify the starfish later. But the tags, which were injected into the starfish, didn't stay.
"But every time we put a tag into a starfish, they rid themselves of the tag within a few days," said the two students, Frederik Ekholm Gaardsted Christensen and Trine Bottos Olsen, in a news release. "It came out directly through the skin; the starfish simply pushed it out through the skin at the end of one arm and then went on as if nothing had happened."
Many animals are capable of removing some foreign objects from their body. For example, a splinter in your finger is eventually pushed out by your body. But when an object is lodged deep inside a body, like a bullet between internal organisms, most don't have a way to get rid of the object without surgery.
In the case of the starfish, the tag would wander seemingly randomly around between their organs before it would finally be squeezed out through an arm tip.
The findings are published in the journal The Biological Bulletin.
Want to see a starfish pushing out a foreign object? Check out the video below, courtesy of YouTube.
Related Stories
Scientists Identify Mysterious Virus that Causes Sea Stars to Melt
For more great science stories and general news, please visit our sister site, Headlines and Global News (HNGN).
See Now: NASA's Juno Spacecraft's Rendezvous With Jupiter's Mammoth Cyclone