Bizarre Discovery: Scientists Identify Sea Creature with 20 Tentacles, Dubbed the ‘Strawberry’ Creature
Researchers trawling the ocean near Antarctica discovered a new species that appears haunting in photos but named it after a fruit.
Greg Rouse, a marine biology professor at the University of California, San Diego, told Insider that the Antarctic strawberry feather star is a sea creature with 20 so-called “arms,” some bumpy and some feathery, and can be up to eight inches in length.
The strawberry feather star was discovered between 215 and 3,840 feet beneath the surface, according to the paper.
The alien-like creature initially does not resemble a strawberry. However, if you zoom in on its body—a tiny nub at the apex of all those arms—it is the same size and shape as the fruit.
According to Rouse, the circular bumps on the star’s body are where the cirri — the smaller tentacle-like strings protruding from the base should be, but they were removed to show the attachment points.
The scientific name for the newly discovered species is Promachocrinus fragarius. It is a type of feather star and belongs to the class Crinoidea, which includes starfish, sea urchins, sand dollars, and sea cucumbers.
Hence the less formal name “Antarctic feather star.” Fragarius derives from the Latin word “fragum,” meaning strawberry, according to the paper.
In an interview, the professor stated that the Antarctic feather star group originally contained only one species: Promachocrinus kerguelensis.
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Discovery of New Antarctic Feather Stars and Their Enigmatic Traits
However, by dragging a net through the Southern Ocean in search of additional specimens of these creatures, a team of scientists from Australia and the United States discovered new species that can be classified as Antarctic feather stars.
They discovered five more with 20 arms and two with 10 arms. Researchers acknowledged in their paper the “otherworldly appearance of the swimming motions of feather stars.”
But finding new species, in general, is not a rare phenomenon, Rouse said, adding that his lab at the university’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography names up to 10 to 15 species a year.
“We find many species. The problem is the amount of work that goes into actually naming them,” he said.
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Source: INSIDER
