Super Starfish on NatGeo



It doesn’t matter if you're watching your diet because of ego, habit or because your doctor has taken to showing you pictures of tombstones with your name photoshopped onto them like the Ghost of Christmas Future. When your darling nieces make specialized Christmas cookies and say “Which one do you want?” you are a bad person if you don’t eat one made by each child. Turning them down will make your heart heavier than your butt could ever be.

Not only did I eat these cookies, I photographed them and want you check out the star-shaped chocolate chip one artfully leaning against my coffee cup (left). I ate that. Then, the next day, I saw it at the bottom of a pet store aquarium (up top). 

“Chocolate chip starfish,” read the placard and I was so spellbound by its stunning similarity to terrestrial baked goods that I ran right home and started looking up more of these animals in the interest of celebrating them in NatGeo’s Weird Animal Questions. I didn’t worry that there wouldn’t be any as cool as the cookie one . When was have you ever looked to anything in nature for beauty and excitement came up snake eyes…including snake eyes? 

Plus I knew just where to look and who to talk to - Christopher Mah of the National Museum of Natural History whose Echinoblog is a great science read - conversational, informative and picture-heavy. Biology is a complicated business but this world expert makes you feel like you’re in on the joy of discovering things right along with him (plus Futurama references are a tribal symbol of friendliness). 

The result is Meet the Chocolate Chip Starfish and Its Unusual Relatives, on NatGeo, in which Chris told me some of his favorites. Bob Scheibling, biologist at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia offered some great information, too and both made points in their interviews that I hope to talk about in future pieces. One is that starfish are massively harvested as ornaments without our even knowing what effect they have on the ocean. Of course they're beautiful - but unless you found it dead on the beach yourself, wouldn't you rather have a ceramic one instead of a humiliated corpse as home decor? 

Some people were bothered by my use of the term ‘starfish’ rather than ‘sea star’ in the piece. I chose starfish because because I think it’s prettier, friendlier and because Chris is the authority and he uses it on his own blog (here’s a nice post from him on the nomenclature quandary). 

Anyway, enjoy the piece, and please don’t reach into a fish tank if you’re hungry….I know we're all cookie-vores but wait until you can get to the bakery. 
                                                                                           
(above right: Starfish,I snapped at Shedd Aquarium in Chicago on 11/30/15)














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