Hold on to your limbs!

Hey everyone, Sej here. This week I’ve been working at Community Boating Inc and Courageous Sailing Center with my awesome team of Luke, Preston, Nhu and Filmawit. We’ve been exploring the harbor and the river with really enthusiastic young people!

Some explorers looking at sea stars and fish 

On Tuesday at Courageous we found plenty of interesting critters in our lobster traps out there. One of which was a sea star that was about 10 inches from the point of one arm to the point of another. One of its five arms had sustained some kind of injury; It looked like something had taken a bite near the end and the area was greyish green. We put the sea star in our touch tank with two rock gunnels and two sculpin.

After showing the fish and sea star to our harbor explorers, we let the animals rest while we were fishing off the pier. A short time later when we were getting ready to release the animals, we saw that the sea star had detached its arm! The arm with the injury was separated from the rest of the sea star and slowly walking away on its little tube feet. It was fascinating to see and teach the kids about.

On Thursday, we found another sea star in one of our traps. This one looked like it had been a detached arm and was beginning to regenerate other limbs to become a whole new sea star.

Sea star regenerating some limbs 

I can’t wait to see what other kinds of biological phenomenon we will see this summer!

Sej