They lay in their thousands, covering the beach in a carpet of pink and orange. Some were curled up, their spiny feet pointing towards the sky. Others lay flat where they had been washed up by the tide. All were dead.
If the collective noun for a normal group of starfish is a constellation, then this pitiful sight on the Kent coastline was more like a galaxy.
Mass starfish strandings, or "wrecks", are not uncommon in Britain and typically happen once a year.
But the scale of death visited upon the beaches of southern England in the past few weeks has stunned conservationists and prompted a major investigation into what could be killing so many marine animals.
It had been assumed - hoped, even - that the deaths were the result of freak weather or unusual tides outside the control of people.
Some of the deaths undoubtedly were. But experts now believe the slaughter which has blighted Kent and Sussex is also the result of human activity - more particularly, the intensive fishing for mussels.
Starfish are without doubt one of the great wonders of the marine world. "They are amazing," says Prof Martin Attrill at Plymouth University, one of Britain's leading starfish experts.
"They have incredible powers of regeneration. If you chop off an arm, it will grow back within months and if you chop a starfish in half, it will grow back into two.
"In the Thames estuary they were once regarded as pests, and fishermen used to try to kill them by slicing them in half and throwing them back. But, of course, all they were doing was doubling the numbers."
Starfish are echinoderms, a family of 7,000 spiny marine creatures that includes sea cucumbers and sea urchins. There are thought to be at least 1,800 different types of starfish in the world, but given that they thrive in deep, dark and inhospitable seabeds, the true number could be much higher.
Most species of starfish have five arms, but some have many more. The sun starfish - a giant creature sometimes seen off the west coast of Britain - can have up to 24 arms and grow up to 30in across.
The creatures found on the beaches of Kent around Pegwell Bay and Sandwich Bay two weeks ago, and on Brighton beach at the weekend, were all common starfish, Asterias rubens, creatures whose dried bodies are sold in gift shops.
Millions of common starfish live in British seas. About the size of a hand, they are pinky orange when alive, but turn a bright orange when dry. And like all starfish, their bodies are a model of engineering ingenuity.
Take their movement. While most animals move using joints and muscles, starfish use the sort of hydraulics normally seen in a JCB digger.
Their bodies are riddled with a network of tubes which carry sea water from a hole on their top side to hundreds of tiny feet which lie in rows along each arm.
These feet are hollow tubes which end in a sucker. By pumping water in and out of these tubes, starfish can move each foot independently, propelling themselves along the seabed.
And the arms aren't just for moving. The tip contains a primitive eye that allows it to see light and dark - and detect movement - while the tube feet remove oxygen from the water.
Starfish have their own version of the anti-fouling paint used on boats to deter parasites and predators. Their bodies are covered with small white objects known as pedicellariae, which prevent animals latching on to them.
If their movement is odd, then the way they eat is positively alien. Their mouths are underneath their bodies, making it difficult to get leverage on prey.
To cope, they have developed the ingenious, if revolting, trick of "everting" their stomachs - turning them inside out as they push them through their mouths out of their body.
"They are very found of mussels," said Prof Attrill. "They clamp their tube feet around a mussel and pull the shell apart.
"Then they evert their stomach like turning a pocket inside out, and push it into the shell to digest the mussel, then suck all its juices.
"It's an easy way of taking in food because you don't have to deal with any bulky material."
Their ideal feeding ground is a mussel bed, where millions of starfish will congregate at any one time. And it's here where they are most at risk.
Violent storms can send terrifically strong currents through the mussel beds where they are feeding, pluck them off their prey, carry them to the shore and dump thousands at a time onto a beach.
After last week's ferocious storms, hundreds of common starfish were found washed ashore at Black Rock in Brighton.
The Environment Agency, which has been called in to investigate the wrecks of the last few weeks, says the storms almost certainly killed the Brighton starfish.
"It's likely that the storms and high spring tides dislodged them from the mussel beds and pushed them on shore," said the agency's spokeswoman, Lucy Harding.
"Once out of the water, they die. But in Kent, thousands of starfish were washed ashore long before the storms.
"We've been investigating what might have killed them and we've ruled out the weather. They were in a good condition and were all washed ashore at the same time, which means we can rule out disease."
The Environment Agency now believes that dredgers - the kind used to scrape the sea floor for mussels - were almost certainly to blame.
The dredging may have killed the starfish in two ways. It may have dislodged them, and the currents carried them to the shore before they then had a chance to grip on any solid object. Or the dredging may have thrown up mud and sand that covered the starfish, effectively suffocating them and killing thousands in one go.
Dr Jean-Luc Solandt, of the Marine Conservation Society, said the mass deaths are yet another example of the dangers of overfishing.
The society is lobbying the Government to dramatically extend its protection of the seas when it publishes the long-awaited Marine Bill next month.
"Dredging is scraping the bottom of the sea and it causes huge collateral damage," he said.
"In Lyme Bay in Dorset, Chesil Beach is littered with sea fans, a type of soft coral, that have been killed by dredging for scallops.
"This dredging should be going on where it doesn't damage the seabed and the ecosystem - places where there's just mud, gravel and sand. They shouldn't be doing it where it causes so much destruction.
"We desperately need to get more of our coastal waters protected. Currently just one per cent of British waters are protected - it should be 30per cent."
"Common starfish are not rare or endangered but it's not about whether species are rare. It's about protecting the whole ecosystem."
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