Let ’s Dive Into the Story of the ‘Ravioli Starfish’ That Looks Like a Stuffed-Pasta Shaped Wonder of the Sea

The newly minted internet star is a starfish that looks like an Italian dinner dish. The “ravioli” starfish, also dubbed online a “cookie” starfish, was the species most frequently found during a recent National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) dive into the Atlantic Ocean off the southeast coast of the U.S. The Plinthaster dentatus, as it’s formally called, is of course not edible. While it may be strange to see this shape of starfish, it’s a pretty normal sea creature, according to Chris Mah, an invertebrate zoology research associate at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. But why do they look like ravioli? Well, as Lady Gaga croons, this species of starfish resembles the doughy pasta dumpling just because it was “born this way.” “Sea stars have a skeleton like we do, in the sense that the inside of their body — their entire body structure — is basically a three-dimensional puzzle,” Mah says. All relatives of sea stars appear similar — flattened with multiple arms that “radiate away from the mouth” — and some look more like Patrick Star from Spongebob than others, like this one. Though the creature was discovered in 1884, according to the NOAA, its biology has been a bit mysterious. With the NOAA’s Okeanos Explorer ship sending robotic vessels into the water to film for research purposes, biologists like Mah can finally learn what the “...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Ocean onetime viral Source Type: news