One thing I absolutely loved to do as a kid was wander around rocky shores, looking for any form of life. I’d lift up whatever rocks I could to search for crabs, I’d run from tidal pool to tidal pool to peer at starfish and sea anemones. I love living in Ontario, but one thing I desperately miss is the ocean. So today I’m going to going to write about a species of sea star, to fully embrace my nostalgic mood.
Probably the most common starfish I encountered as a child were large purple ones. Unsurprisingly, these are known as purple sea stars, but confusingly are also known as ocher sea stars, since not all of them are purple. They can also be orange, yellow, red or brown. That being said, most of these guys are purple, so I’ll refer to them as purple sea stars. They have five legs, each of which can be from 10 to 25 cm long. Purple sea stars are covered in very small spines, which are no bigger than 2 mm in height.
Purple sea stars live in the Pacific Ocean, from Alaska to California. Depthwise, they can be found from 90 m to the low-tide zone. They are commonly found along the coast, on mussel beds and rocky shores. Special suckers on their feet allow purple sea stars to cling to rocks with great force, so they can withstand violent waves.
Despite their harmless looks, purple sea stars are quite vicious eaters. They feed mainly on mussels, but will also eat chitons, limpets, snails, barnacles, and sea urchins. They will swallow their prey whole if they can, grabbing their meal with their tubular feet and then everting their stomach onto their prey. The digestive enzymes in the starfish’s stomachs will then liquify the victim, so it can be easily ingested.
Mussels try and defend against starfish by clamping their shells together very tightly, but sea stars are patient hunters. Mussels need to open their shells slightly, both to breathe and to feed. The starfish then use their strong feet to pull the mussel shell further open, and insert part of their stomach into the shell, digesting the poor mussel inside. Purple sea stars have quite large appetites, with one sea star being able to eat eighty Californian mussels a year (a California mussel can reach lengths of 20 cm, so they aren’t small).
Purple sea stars breeding from May to July, with both sexes releasing gametes into the water. If all goes well, sperm and eggs meet in the ocean, and the fertilized eggs can drift around until they hatch. Sea stars progress through a number of larval stages, and at this stage of their life the little starfish are filter feeders, relying on plankton to sustain them. Purple sea stars live to be at least four years of age, and may live much longer.
Purple sea stars aren’t just pretty; they are an extremely important species. Thanks to their diet, purple sea stars help keep mussel populations under control. A loss of only a few purple sea stars leads to a drastic increase in mussel populations. When sea stars are present, the intertidal ecosystem is diverse, instead of becoming dominated by mussels. So next time you see a sea star, remember that they help keep our oceans wonderfully diverse!
Cover image by Lana_aka_BADGRL from Maple Valley, WA, USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Our Wild World 
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