A sea star the size of a fingernail, living under stones, and usually visibly lopsided - which is the point of the card.
This genus reproduces by tearing itself in half. The animal splits across the disc, the two pieces move apart, and each regrows the arms it lacks; a population can be almost entirely clones produced this way, with sexual reproduction happening rarely or not at all in some places. That is why the arms are never even, and why the number of them varies from five to eight in animals that are otherwise identical.
It was described in 2007 and named for Chantal Conand, whose work on the echinoderms of the western 🌊 Indian Ocean is a large part of why the small ones here can be identified at all.
Turn over a stone in shallow water and look for something small, flat and asymmetric moving very slowly. Put the stone back the way it was - the underside is a habitat, and it dies when it dries.
- tiny flat star, usually with six or seven arms rather than five
- arms often unequal - the animal is regrowing half of itself
- mottled gray-green, under stones rather than on them
- diameter up to 2 cm
