27. Basket stars have a five-pointed body with multiple arms.
They look kind of creepy, but they’re pretty harmless; to humans, anyway. They’re a form of brittle star, which use their flexible arms to crawl across the ocean. This feature is much different from starfish, which have lots of little tubes on their appendages’ bottoms to move them around. Basket stars have a five-pointed body, each with an arm. Each arm may have two main branches, with many smaller ones extending from each of the bigger ones. In all, one arm may be up to a couple of feet long.
Basket stars live in deep-sea habitats and can live up to about 35 years. The basket star feeds by anchoring itself to the seafloor and extending its arms into the current, forming a wide basket. Small shellfish, jellyfish, and other critters that float with the current will actually flow right into the basket. The barbs on the ends of the sub-branches trap the prey, encase it in strands of mucus, then pull it down to the basket star’s mouth.