Starfish Ages

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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.