On an extended research visit to a friend’s lab in Tokyo, marine biologists Amy Johnson and Olaf Ellers witnessed something they’d never seen before. The starfish in Tatsuo Motokawa’s lab weren’t ...

There are a lot of things you take for granted when you have a head. One of those is the direction that you walk in. But what if you had no head? Surprisingly, no scientist had ever thought to ...

A typical starfish has five-sided symmetry. With no clear head, the starfish can move in any direction, led by any one of its five arms. If you were feeling particularly cruel, you could fold one up ...

Stars twinkle overhead, but under the sea, stars huddle together. Sea stars, that is! Sea stars (Asteroidea), commonly known as starfish, are invertebrates called echinoderms — creatures with hard, ...