Figure 1. Crown-of-thorns starfish and their legacy. (A) A group of crown-of-thorns starfish converge on the remaining small piece of living coral tissue (lc) on the surface of a tabular coral (Acropora sp.) The other coral tissue has just been consumed by the starfish so that only the white skeleton remains (cs). (B) After crown-of-thorns starfish have removed the living coral tissue, the expo...

How do they reproduce? Unlike many other starfish, the general body surface of crown-of-thorns starfish is soft and flexible, which enables it to swell as it develops huge gonads. Fecundity is obviously related to size, but, as an example, a 40 cm diameter crown-of-thorns starfish may commit about 45% of its total body energy to reproduction and shed an astonishing 50 million eggs. Like many ma...

Starfish typically show pentameral symmetry, and they are typically similar in shape to a pentagram. Although starfish can evolve and live with other numbers of arms, the dominant species always show pentameral symmetry. We used mathematical and physical methods to analyze the superiority of starfish with five arms in comparison with those with a different number of arms with respect to detecti...

Saponin is the generic name of steroid or triterpene glycosides, and the capacities of some saponins to stimulate both Th1 immune response and production of cytotoxic T cells are useful as vaccine components against intracellular pathogens. Because saponins have been found commonly in starfish, we assessed the potential of starfish, Asterias amurensis and Asterina pectinifera, as adjuvant sourc...

1. The marine gastropods Acmaea (Collisella) limatula and Acmaea (Notoacmea) scutum respond to distant predatory starfish (i.e. to starfish scent) by moving up a vertical surface. 2. The distance chemoreceptors that mediate this avoidance behaviour are located on the mantle margin. Heat cauterization of the limpets' mantle margin eliminates their responsiveness to Pisaster ochraceus scent, whil...

In this paper we present StarFish, a highly-available geographically-dispersed block storage system built from commodity servers running FreeBSD, which are connected by standard high-speed IP networking gear. StarFish achieves high availability by transparently replicating data over multiple storage sites. StarFish is accessed via a host-site appliance that masquerades as a host-attached storag...

Interleukin 1 (IL-1) is the major immunoregulatory molecule produced by macrophages and other related cells. It acts as the molecular orchestrator of nonspecific host defense mechanisms against multifarious insults. In this study we report the characterization of an IL-1-like protein from the starfish Asterias forbesi. IL-1-like activity was found in the coelomocytes of this invertebrate and wa...

To study the effects of metals on starfish in field conditions, immune responses were measured in starfish from natural populations along a metal pollution gradient (long-term contamination) and in starfish that were transferred up the gradient (short-term contamination). Coelomic amoebocyte concentration (CAC) and production of reactive oxygen species (ROS) by amoebocytes were measured in two ...

G2-arrested oocytes contain cdc2 kinase as an inactive cyclin B-cdc2 complex. When a small amount of highly purified and active cdc2 kinase, prepared from starfish oocytes at first meiotic metaphase, is microinjected into Xenopus oocytes, it induces activation of the inactive endogenous complex and, as a consequence, drives the recipient oocytes into M phase. In contrast, the microinjected kina...