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Starfish

Cushion Star

Asterina gibbosa

Asterina gibbosa (Pennant, 1777) · Asterinidae WoRMS 123987

Reference photos

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A small starfish, up to about 5 cm across, with five very short broad-based arms, so it looks more like a rounded pentagon than a pointed star. The upper surface is domed and covered with groups of short stiff spines, and the colour is variable but usually brown, green or orange. Look under boulders and stones on the lower shore and in rockpools. Every cushion star begins life as a male and becomes female as it grows.

Depth

Lower shore down to about 100 m, with records to about 125 m

Size

Up to about 5 cm across

Habitat

Under boulders and stones and in crevices on sheltered to semi-exposed rocky shores, and in rockpools

Behaviour

Solitary and slow-moving, crawling over rock and the seabed surface; feeds as an omnivore, predator and scavenger

Diet

I eat

  • Bottom-living invertebrates, including crustaceans, molluscs and other echinoderms
  • Worms and brittlestars from among the rocks, digested by turning the stomach out over them
  • Microorganisms, decaying seaweed and dead invertebrates, taken by scavenging

Eats me

  • Prawns, which eat the egg masses the females lay under rocks and then abandon

Where you'd find it

Found around most of Britain and Ireland, though less often in the Celtic Sea and the North Sea.

ChannelCeltic SeaNorth SeaIrish SeaW of IrelandW of Scotland
Often seenNow and thenWhere PEBL filmsBased on marine survey records (OBIS). Blank seas can mean nobody has looked there, not that the animal is absent.

Sources

Open-access references behind this page. Every statement on this page was read out of one of them; anything that could not be traced to a source was taken off the page rather than left standing. Each link was checked on the date shown, and confirmed then to be about this species.

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