8/30/2023 0 Comments Sea of stars mississippi![]() ![]() They can be a challenge to find, but that just makes it all the more special. Next time you visit the Maine coast, I hope you’re lucky enough to stumble upon a sea star. Mississippi Aquarium CEO Kurt Allen has more. The video is called “ Sea Star Research with Melina Giakoumis.” The Mississippi Aquarium is hosting a free event at Jones Park in Gulfport this Friday evening to kick off the Cruisin’ the Coast festivities. White of the Maine Sea Grant Program.Īlso, sea star researcher Giakoumis gave an online presentation about her work that’s available to watch on YouTube. ![]() If you’re interested in learning about animals along the Maine coast, I suggest checking out the book “Life Between the Tides: Marine Plants and Animals of the Northeast,” written by Les Watling, Jill Fegley and John Moring, illustrated by Andrea Sulzer and edited by Susan K. By the time the project wrapped up, they had received nearly 100 sea star observations. To learn if the phenomenon was widespread, they asked the public to take photos of sea stars along the Maine coast that summer. Two years ago, the Shaw Institute and Schoodic Institute noticed an unusually high number of sea stars at their research stations in Blue Hill and Winter Harbor. By knocking out some of the mussels, sea stars free up space for other animals to thrive. ![]() They eat a variety of animals including blue mussels, which form colonies that dominate rocky coastlines. Sea stars are a keystone species, meaning they have a big impact on the ecosystem they live in. I called them starfish.Ī sea star clings to a number of rocks above the low tide mark on Mount Desert Island on July 15, 2022. Credit: Courtesy of Aislinn Sarnacki I’ve been finding sea stars along the Maine coast since I was a little girl. I’ve seen them described as fragile, yet they’ve also adapted to be able to live in the intertidal zone, which alternates between wet and dry, cold and hot. Simply put, sea stars need water to survive. Since that recent day on the beach, I did a little research about sea stars, and I learned that picking them up is usually frowned upon, especially if you remove them from water to do so. I don’t know much about sea stars, but I do know that they can dry out if left exposed to the open air for too long. All of those signs pointed to the creature being alive and well, so I placed it into the water. When I turned the sea star over, I found a few pebbles were being held by its many tube feet. It wasn’t bleached out by the sun or stiff from drying out. To me, it seemed to have a healthy color. I picked it up, wondering if it was still alive. A deep purple-gray with white spines, the sea star was nearly the size of my hand. ![]()
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