Starfish Dissection Essay

For my final project in Zoology I choose to write about the Starfish and Mussels we dissected. I chose these because, for me, these dissections were the most fun! Seeing what was inside of the starfish was nothing I had thought it would be, and the mussel is something I eat but usually it is mostly cleaned out by then so it was interesting to see what it looked like before it was cooked. As well as dissecting these animals, I was able to learn about how they interact with one another. In this essay I am going to cite information from J Exp Biol 2013, an article published in the Journal of Experimental Biology, and An Intertidal Sea Star Adjusts Thermal Inertia to Avoid Extreme Body Temperatures from University of South Carolina Scholar Commons. Mussels are able to move slowly by the muscular foot. They feed and breathe by filtering water through extensible tubes called siphon; This is a large mussel that filters 10 gal of water per day. The close-fitting shells protect the mussel from desiccation and enable it to live high up on the shore.

The sea star, also known as the starfish, have no brains and no blood. Their nervous system is spread through their arms and their “blood” is actually filtered sea water. To keep cool, sea stars hook on to rocks on hot days and fill of there arms with the cool water that washes up to them. They soak it
Starfish are a marine echinoderm with five or more radiating arms. The undersides of the arms bear tube feet for hooking on to different things and also moving in general. Sea stars and mussels interact with each other because the predators of the mussel are some kinds of starfish. If the sea star was removed from the ecosystem, the mussel population would explode uncontrollably, driving out most other species, while the urchin population annihilates coral