Indicated Featherstar

A feather star does not hunt. It builds a net out of itself and then holds still. This one climbs to an exposed corner of the reef, grips the rock with the ring of hooked legs under its disc, and spreads its arms into a fan set across the current so that moving water does the delivering. Every arm carries two rows of pinnules, every pinnule carries sticky tube feet, and a particle that touches one is flicked into a groove running the length of the arm and carried to the mouth on a current of beating cilia. The mouth faces upward, away from the rock, which is the reverse of a sea star and the whole reason a crinoid can eat without going anywhere.

Stephanometra is recognized by hardware rather than by color. The pinnules closest to the base of each arm are enlarged into stiff, segmented spikes that stand up around the central disc like a fence, shielding the soft body and the mouth while the feeding arms stay out in the open. Color is close to worthless for identification here: 🌊 Red Sea animals run from pale pink with red bands through orange with white bands to deep maroon, purple and nearly black, and several 🌊 Red Sea forms are still carried in the reference books as unnamed Stephanometra. What can be trusted is the crown of spikes and the arm count, roughly twenty to forty rather than the ten of the small featherstars.

By day the animal is wedged into a crevice with only the arm tips showing, and it opens fully after dark. It can let go and crawl, and it can swim, lifting alternating sets of arms in sequence. Its youth is stranger than any of that: eggs and sperm break out straight through the walls of the reproductive pinnules into the water, and the larva that settles grows a stalk and spends its first months as a miniature sea lily rooted to the reef. Then it snaps its own stalk and walks away. Every feather star on a 🌊 Red Sea coral head is a sea lily that gave up being attached.