Nature
PUBLISHED
With built-in armor, inside-out stomachs and the power to regenerate lost limbs, starfish are fascinating creatures. They also apparently prefer not to be test subjects, as two biology students have recently discovered.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.Much like microchips are implanted into pets to identify and track them, two students were tasked with injecting small tags into starfish to make them easily identifiable for further research.
But these starfish do not want to participate.
A few days later, the students found that the starfish were harmlessly spouting the tags out. The tags, traveling around the starfish without hitting any organs or harming the echinoderm, were being forced out of their arms.
Though researchers aren't quite sure how the starfish are doing this, their findings are described in a paper published in The Biological Bulletin.
Watch the video below of the students talking about this fascinating discovery and their suggestion for a possible solution to the tagging trouble.
[H/T Popular Science]
