Starfish Jesus

How many disciples does Jesus have? Marine biologists can help us find the answer.

Picture a starfish by the ocean. How many arms does it have?

One, two, three, four, five. Five arms.

Obvious, right? Anyone who has walked the beach or visited an aquarium and seen one knows this. Even a child, playing in the sand over the Fourth of July, knows that a starfish has five arms.

But guess what? You’re wrong.

“The answer,” writes Dino Grandoni in The Washington Post, “is stranger than anything most scientists expected. Simply put, the sea star, also known as starfish, appears to be mostly just a head.”

So, the correct answer is … zero arms. Starfish are just heads that crawl along the seafloor.

If that is not surprising enough, Grandoni reports that starfish, “despite their strange appearance, aren’t that distantly related to humans, sharing an ancestor 600 million years ago.”

You may think that you have some odd-looking relatives. Most of us do. But none quite as strange as a starfish.

 

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