Message, Intercepted 

Starfish might seem harmless marine wallflowers.  

However, these creatures are voracious predators, capable of swarming in huge numbers and stripping entire acres of coral bare within a few months. 

Around for over 500 million years, preceding even dinosaurs, starfish, however, remain among the most mysterious and misunderstood creatures on the planet. 

Now, a new study of crown-of-thorns starfish (Acanthaster planci, or CoTS) has uncovered details about how they use their spines to communicate, potentially offering insight into how to protect the ocean reef from these alien-like marine predators, New Atlas explained. 

“Through genomic and proteomic analysis, we found that the CoTS spines are used to both sense and secrete a wide range of peptides – not just defensive toxins,” study author Noriyuki Satoh said in a statement.  

The messages are sent and received by the long spines that cover CoTS’ flat bodies. 

This invisible communication system is a sort of marine mind control technique that allows brainless, bloodless CoTS to stay in touch and move and act together. 

These starfish can use large amounts of their bodies in an attack and have the ability to regrow tissue – as long as their central disc, housing the stomach, remains intact. 

CoTS’ disc and their many limbs are protected by long, sharp, venomous spines, which make them a tough species, despite being invertebrates. 

They are also surprisingly strong and agile, gliding over sessile coral and enveloping it, then releasing digestive enzymes that liquefy their prey so it can be sucked straight into their stomachs. 

The newly discovered spine-based communication system is especially important because, so far, efforts to control swarms of starfish have been mostly futile, requiring each individual animal to be located and removed – scientists hadn’t understood how they were communicating to stage organized attacks. 

Building on this discovery, scientists extracted specific proteins from their spines and successfully created a non-toxic, low-dose synthetic peptide, which they then introduced into a water tank containing the starfish. 

The captive creatures became more active and started moving in specific directions due to the peptides, which acted like smoke signals in the water and led them to gather in one place. 

“These (peptides) may promote swarming, and so we synthesized the peptides that we suspected function like pheromones for communication and found that they consistently affect the trajectories of the starfish,” said Satoh. 

Scientists ruled out external factors as reasons for this behavior because the peptides didn’t match any known immune or stress responses, nor were they linked to physical processes such as skin shedding. 

While the message embedded in the proteins remains a mystery, the discovery could help lure these predators to one designated spot for culling to safeguard the ocean reef from attacks.