Cool, I have to use that sometime.
Now on to the aliens among us. Echinoderms have 6 major groups:
Brittlestars are seastars with long, slender arms and tube feet without suckers.
Starfish are seastars with short arms that have more tissue connecting them to the body (looks like fleshy webbing).
Sea urchins are spherical with long spines (and their cousins the sand dollars are flat without spines).
Sea daisies are tiny, flat animals that are basically seastars without arms.
Sea lilies and featherstars are shaped like plants. Some are stalked and all have feeding arms covered with "feathers." I used them in a Gamma World setting where they covered the near shore bottom and were poison using ambush predators.
And last, but not least is Henry's favorite- the sea cucumber. Most look like their namesake, but a few have sensory tentacles surrounding the mouth. Most famous for emiting digestive organs when attempting to excape a predator (and has an 80% survival rate from doing that.) Goodman's Monsters of the Boundless Blue has a version of giant sea cucumber I consider excellent.
Why I call them aliens come from some of their unique features- 5 part symmetry, the fact that seastars don't age (or they do age, they just don't weaken due to age), the water sustion system that some use as locomotion and prey capture (starfish use the suckered tubes with suction to hold on to prey), their brainless existance for being so complex otherwise (vermin type to a tee), and their regeneration. Most can replace lost parts, but the adage that a starfish can regenerate from a single arm is false (with one exception)- they require some of the central disc to survive.
Now on to the aliens among us. Echinoderms have 6 major groups:
Brittlestars are seastars with long, slender arms and tube feet without suckers.
Starfish are seastars with short arms that have more tissue connecting them to the body (looks like fleshy webbing).
Sea urchins are spherical with long spines (and their cousins the sand dollars are flat without spines).
Sea daisies are tiny, flat animals that are basically seastars without arms.
Sea lilies and featherstars are shaped like plants. Some are stalked and all have feeding arms covered with "feathers." I used them in a Gamma World setting where they covered the near shore bottom and were poison using ambush predators.
And last, but not least is Henry's favorite- the sea cucumber. Most look like their namesake, but a few have sensory tentacles surrounding the mouth. Most famous for emiting digestive organs when attempting to excape a predator (and has an 80% survival rate from doing that.) Goodman's Monsters of the Boundless Blue has a version of giant sea cucumber I consider excellent.
Why I call them aliens come from some of their unique features- 5 part symmetry, the fact that seastars don't age (or they do age, they just don't weaken due to age), the water sustion system that some use as locomotion and prey capture (starfish use the suckered tubes with suction to hold on to prey), their brainless existance for being so complex otherwise (vermin type to a tee), and their regeneration. Most can replace lost parts, but the adage that a starfish can regenerate from a single arm is false (with one exception)- they require some of the central disc to survive.
