While riding my bicycle on the bridge near the center of Kailua Beach Park last week, I spotted a cushion star dead on the sand. I kept riding but couldn’t stop thinking about the maroon — and marooned — starfish, taken from its ocean home and left stranded. The sight of it made me grumpy, disgusted by human beings.
A starfish can have as many as 50 arms — the one in Hawaii with the most arms has a name to match its beauty: the magnificent star. The starfish has 10 or 11 arms, grows to 2 feet across and covers itself in sand in deep water. Most Hawaii divers have never seen a magnificent star, nor have I, but I live in hope.
On the opposite end of the scale are cushion stars, which have no arms. Some have five rounded bumps on their edges, giving the body a vague star shape, but many are round. Most look like plump throw pillows.
We can only wish we had such lovely decorations for our beds and couches. Cushion stars come in red, maroon, tan and yellow, in endless superb patterns. The largest grow to about 10 inches across and 4 inches thick.
Like all starfish, which are close relatives of sea urchins, cushion stars have sticky tube feet in canals that radiate from the central mouth outward to the edge of the animal. If a cushion star is flipped upside down, it can right itself by puffing up one side of its body with water, arching over to get a grip on the bottom with its tube feet, and pulling itself over.
Given the variety of shapes and colors, it seems as if Hawaii hosts a dozen kinds of cushion stars, but we have only one, also found throughout tropical waters of the Pacific and Indian oceans.
These starfish are not abundant, which is probably a good thing, since they eat coral. One cushion star can kill a small coral colony. Even so, I have not heard of cushion star blooms that devastate coral reefs, like their notorious cousins the crown-of-thorns starfish.
Some sources use the name "pin cushion stars" for cushion starfish. A real pin cushion that big, though, would take up your entire sewing basket. And there are no small ones. Young cushion stars look like traditional, five-armed starfish, becoming pillowy only as adults.
In some circles the correct term for starfish is sea star, because it bothered some people that starfish contains the word "fish." But I don’t get it. No one mistakes a starfish for a real fish (or, say, a sea horse for a real horse), and correcting people to say "sea star" only makes them feel uninformed.
Besides, when I use the term sea star, people invariably say, "You mean a starfish?" And since, yes, I do mean a starfish, I say so in the first place.
The sight of that forsaken cushion star bugged me so much that a minute after passing, I rode back to the site. I must try to rescue the creature, I thought. Maybe it’s still alive.
Going back to save that starfish made my day. In this popular kayak-launching area, someone had dropped a small, round, bumpy-textured, burgundy-colored throw pillow.
I rescued the cushion and felt much better about my species.
———
Reach Susan Scott at www.susanscott.net.
