3/11/2024 0 Comments Can a tarfish stick to your kinI can understand not wanting to confuse people any more than they already are. Everyone is wrong.īut as much as I would love for the name asteroid to catch on, I hear it’s already taken. Thus, starfish are really asteroids! Problem solved. When combined, “aster” and “eidos” mean “star-like,” and the class of echinoderms that starfish reside in is the Asteroidea. “Eidos,” on the other hand, means “form” or “essence” or was used to suggest similarity. “Aster” simply means “star,” which, it would seem, everyone has picked up on already. Studying the shape and form of various starfish, Ducrotay brought together the Greek “aster” and “eidos” in the classical manner of giving animals a descriptive name from ancient languages. Technically speaking, scientifically speaking, we should probably just look toward the name that their class was given in 1830 by the French zoologist Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville. If we were being completely honest with ourselves, neither starfish or sea star would be the real name of our five-legged friends – though not all of them actually have five legs and some have as many as 40. I’m not going to beat around the bush here. Given all the things happening in the world of politics and science and pseudoscience that can be argued these days, it seems almost trivial, dare I say pedantic, to get sucked into the “sea star” versus “starfish” debate. I’m not so sure as to what this says about the company that I keep. Somehow, the debate over what to call these iconic little echinoderms surfaces in my world on at least an annual basis. This is eastern North Carolina, to suggest that anything other than vinegar, cold slaw and hot sauce belongs on our pulled pork would solicit a mob of angry villagers storming your house in the night with pitchforks and torches in hand. Actually, that last bit about barbecue is not up for discussion. For marine bio nerds, this is kind of like a Ford-versus-Chevy argument, like Land Rover versus Land Cruiser, or vinegar versus no vinegar on your barbecue.
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