this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2024
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Sea anemones are relatives of the jellyfish. They have these tiny hairs growing on them that they use to feed by stunning fish, shrimp, zooplankton, and so on.
But they can survive for years without food. They're like jellyfish in that way. There are even sea anemones that have lived longer than 70 years with the proper care.
They're found all throughout the world's oceans, and they can slowly move too. There are also fish that live inside them called anemonefish. The sea anemones protect them from predators and share their food scraps.
In tropical waters, sea anemones latch on to coral reefs or rocks.
Starfish are echinoderms and relatives of the sea urchin. There are as many as 2,000 starfish species around the world. Not all of them are star-shaped either. There's even a species with 30 arms.
When they get attacked by a predator, they'll rip off their own arm to get away while the predator eats it. Their arms can regenerate, so I guess they regrow later.
Starfish can eat almost anything in the ocean. They feed by pushing their stomach out of their mouth and directly digesting their prey. Fun fact, there's an area in Kumamoto Prefecture where they eat starfish. As you'd expect from a relative of the sea urchin, you strip the skin to eat the insides, like with sea urchins.
Even in other languages, starfish mostly have star-related names. For instance, in France they're called...
... "étoile de mer", which would roughly translate as "star of the sea" or "sea star" - the same as the Spanish "estrella de mar", Portuguese "estrela do mar" or Romanian "stea de mare".