Starfish Ages

Link to the information page!

This blog is a class response blog from when I was told that in order to tell a starfish's age you looked at its "rings". Although I know this was a joke, I've decided to investigate how you actually tell a sea star's age. You can tell the age based on diet, growth rate, reproductive system and how many arms it has. When it is in the younger stages of life, the sea star might not have as many arms as it would when it gets older. For example, when the starfish is under six months old, it may have three or four arms. However, as it ages, it might gain more. Also, as it gets older, like most animals, the sea star becomes more sexually mature. The diet also matures from it's original feeding habits of algae and eggs, to coral, and then into more adult foods. But in the later years of it's life, reproduction lessens and the growth rate falls dramatically. More to the point, that is the actual way to tell a sea star's age.

Frozen Mars robot

The article

In May of 2008 NASA sent Mars lander Phoenix to gather information on the red planet. However, they are not sure if Phoenix survived the Martian winter, and are hoping to receive evidence that it has thawed and back up and running. Some of Phoenix's successes include that it has:

- Seen snow falling on Mars
-"tasted" Martian water dug up from the ground

and perhaps one of the most exciting is that it may have seen liquid water as salty drops on its own leg. NASA will also ping Phoenix to see if they will receive a response. Also, the Spirit rover is stuck on Mars, and after 6 years of activity, might be on the verge of death. The upcoming Mars project, the Curiosity rover, is incessantly encountering technical issues. There is also a large chance that Phoenix will not rise again. But according to Chad Edwards, who works on the rovers, "We owe it to the lander, for all the good science it did, to give it a shot." I agree with Edwards, and I hope all will be worked out with the different rovers.