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Evolutionary biology

A star is born

Nature volume 390, pages 556–557 (1997)Cite this article

To see the constellations of Australia's temperate east coast, you should look down instead of up. There, among the cobbles and kelp, live a swarm of multi-armed and multi-hued starfish of the genus Patiriella. The different species vary in size from a tea-cup saucer to a thumb-nail, but their most fascinating differences lie in how they reproduce1,2.

Some produce tiny eggs that develop first into flop-limbed, free-swimming larvae before transforming into tiny crawling stars. Others produce larger, yolky eggs that develop directly into starfish with no intervening larval phase. Some adults brood their embryos in the gonad where cannibalistic juveniles fight their siblings for the right to be born; others cast their eggs anonymously into the sea. Yet all these species are closely related, and a study by Hart et al.3, just published in Evolution, uses phylogenetic methods to reconstruct how this wealth of developmental diversity has evolved.

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Figure 1: Phylogenetic relationships among 12 species of the starfish genera Patiriella and Asterina.

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  1. the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, 26 Oxford Street, Cambridge, 02138, Massachusetts, USA

    Stephen R. Palumbi

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  1. Stephen R. Palumbi
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Palumbi, S. A star is born. Nature 390, 556–557 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1038/37483

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