Scientists have discovered a new type of feather star with 20 arms

• Researchers have discovered a new type of star pen with 20 “arms”.
• This species belongs to the group of Antarctic feather stars and is widely related to starfish.
• Scientists named their discovery strawberry.

Researchers roaming the ocean off Antarctica have discovered a new species that looks terrifying in photos — but they’ve dubbed it a fruit.

The Antarctic strawberry starfish is a sea creature that has 20 so-called “arms”—some lumpy, some feathery—and can be up to eight inches long, said Greg Ross, a professor of marine biology at the University of California, San Diego. . said the insider.

Ross co-authored the paper on the new species with researchers Emily McLaughlin and Nereid Wilson, and their findings Systematic Invertebrate Science Last month.

The alien-like creature doesn’t look like a strawberry at first. But when you zoom in on the body — the small part at the top of the arms — it resembles the size and shape of a fruit.

The circular protrusions on the star’s body are where the cirri should have been — the smaller, tentacle-like strings that protrude from the base — but have been removed to show the attachment points, Ross said.

“We bought a bunch of cirri so you can see what parts they’re attached to and this is what strawberries look like,” he said.

He added that Siri has small tentacles at the end that grip the sea floor.

The so-called arms are the longer, feather-like parts of the Strawberry Antarctic feather star. They’re usually spread out, Ross said, and help the creature move around.

The official name of the newly discovered species is Promachocrinus fragarius. It belongs to the class Crinoidea, which includes starfish, sea urchins, sand dollars, and sea cucumbers, and is a type of feather star—hence the less formal name “Antarctic feather star.” According to the newspaper, the word “fragarius” is derived from the Latin word “fragum,” which means strawberry.

The professor said in an interview that there was originally only one species within the Antarctic star cluster – Promachocrinus kerguelensis.

But a team of scientists from Australia and the United States has identified four new species that may belong to the Antarctic pole group, dragging into the Southern Ocean to search for more specimens of these creatures.

The Antarctic starfish is particularly notable for its many “arms”. “Most pen stars have 10 arms,” ​​said Ross.

Ross added that the typical position of the feather star is with the “arms” outstretched and upward, with the cirri pointing downward.

According to Ross, the discovery leads researchers to eight species in the Antarctic starfish class, adding the four new discoveries and “reviving” previously discovered animals that were originally thought to be of their own genus.

“We’ve gone from one species with 20 arms to now eight — six with 20 arms and two with 10 called Promachocrinus,” Ross said.

According to the paper, the Strawberry Star was found in Antarctica somewhere between 215 feet and about 3,840 feet below the surface.

In their announcement, the researchers acknowledge that it is “another manifestation of the swimming motion of feather stars.”

Finding new species isn’t uncommon, Ross said, adding that his lab at the university’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography catches 10 to 15 species annually.

“We find a lot of species. The problem is how much work goes into naming them.