✦ New research Nature · November 2023

Quick & curious · Nature

Genetically, a starfish is almost all head.

An orange-red bat star (Patiria miniata) among green grass blades and dark algae
Photo: Jerry Kirkhart from Los Osos, Calif. · CC BY 2.0 · Original

The story behind it

Genetically, a starfish is almost all head – one that crawls along the seafloor.

Stanford researchers sliced starfish arms into thin sections and mapped the genes that lay out head, trunk and tail in other animals. Head genes were active almost everywhere, trunk genes hardly. The "front" is the middle of each arm.