In our latest Blunt Letters podcast episode, Micaela and Elle bring back the New Animal Drop segment to bring you news of the Antarctic strawberry feather star (SFS)!
Named for the strawberry-like “nub” on its body, the feather star is a type of Crinoid – a group of perfectly symmetrical creatures that includes sea lilies and sea feathers. SFS starts out with a stalk attached to the bottom of the seafloor but eventually, the critter detaches and floats through the water with rhythmic swishes of their many arms.
Nerida Wilson, an invertebrate marine biologist at the Western Australian Museum, and her colleagues reported the Antarctic strawberry feather star and three other new feather star species in a study published in July.
As we mentioned on the show, we thought the SFS looked like the thing from The Thing (1982), a movie where Antarctic research scientists run into a parasitic alien that eventually drives them all to madness, but actually, sea feathers have been around for a long time. These creatures ruled the oceans when the earth was just getting started, then were nearly wiped out about 251 million years ago during the Permian mass extinction, but managed to stick around. In fact, though they were originally thought to be all one species, recent research has revealed that there are actually 8 different species of these sea feathers!
The strawberry feather star may strike you as beautiful or creepy but we like it because it’s a bit of both.
Learn more in our recent episode:
The Blunt Letters Podcast 